Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

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Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

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Avarice – Part 2

In 2008, the vested interests of banking and corporate America were so afraid of what Barack Obama might do to regulate the markets - after the subprime scandal and the crash that came in its wake - that John Galt and Atlas Shrugged seemed like a clarion call. Far from the crash shaming the bankers and their apologists, the rise of the Occupy movement and other anti-capitalist and anti-globalist coalitions in its aftermath, caused the capitalist true believers to double down on the virtues of free markets, small government, and great individuals.

Hence the resurgence of interest in Ayn Rand and her works. As Amy Benfer, in a fine Mother Jones article entitled “And the Rand Played On” observed at the time:
Her [Rand's] particular genius has always been her ability to turn upside down traditional hierarchies, and recast the wealthy, the talented, and the powerful as the oppressed.
Donald Trump cites The Fountainhead as one of the few works of fiction he admires. Other noted adherents include Ron Paul and his son, Rand Paul - short for Randall, not in fact, as widely believed, named after Ayn Rand. Ted Cruz, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, Judge Clarence Thomas, Sajid Javid, former Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Fraser, Facebook billionaire Peter Thiel, Uber founder Travis Kalanick, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Apple’s Steve Jobs, John Mackey of the Whole Foods Market, and dozens of other Silicon Valley “Big cheeses” have all identified as Randians or Randites.

In fields as disparate as comic books and tennis, her name is revered by many, including Spiderman's Frank Miller and Steve Ditko, Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry - not to mention assembled media figures like Hunter S Thompson, Neil Peart of the band Rush, Magician Penn Jilette, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Vince Vaughn, Amber Herd, Oliver Stone, Sandra Bullock, Jim Carey, Rob Lowe, Martina Navratilova, Billy Jean King, Chris Evert - it's really quite a list.

And the many Rand societies and foundations that flourish around the world are proof of the staying power of her ideas - love them or loathe them. For of course there are those who do loathe everything to do with her. Such a point of view often showing the kind of disdain that causes her adherence to cry “Snobbery!” and “Metropolitan elitism.” Though how a true follower of Rand can use elitism as an insult is hard to explain. Or “metropolitan” come to that. Rand adored big cities and claimed to have burst into tears when she first beheld the Manhattan Skyline.

Urban Dictionary has this definition of “Randite”
Someone who thinks that Ayn Rand is not only a philosopher but has logical consistency. See also “Asshat”
In general, academia would go along with that, relegating her to the status of little more than a freakish footnote in mainstream courses in philosophy, politics, and economics - which isn't to say that there aren't accredited, tenured and respected philosophers and others who do offer courses in Objectivism.

Rand didn't call herself a libertarian - allying that in her mind with anarchy, which she despised - but she shared the essential libertarian instincts of distrusting any kind of legislation to control morality. While she claimed to be revolted by homosexuality, for example, she absolutely opposed the legislation that outlawed it. Most of her Republican fans - at the tea party end especially - have to square their admiration for Rand, not only with her laissez faire attitude to the bedroom, but more problematically for them, her absolutely committed atheism and hatred of religion and her resolute and oft-stated belief in the rights of women to terminate their pregnancies.

Her definition of freedom was this:
Freedom: noun. To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.
Rather pathetically, Ayn Rand - the lifelong enemy of big government subsidies and state handouts - spent her last years in entirely depending on welfare and Medicare. A six-foot dollar sign was placed by her coffin, evoking the final image of Atlas Shrugged, where Galt carves a giant dollar into the hillside.

Well now, this podcast is supposed to be examining Greed and Avarice, not the complex, maddening and peculiar life and works of Ayn Rand! But she stands as a deeply influential flag bearer for classical liberalism taken to the edge, dragging the rational self-interest that figures like Adam Smith held to be the benevolent force that made markets work for the good of all, into something crueller and more brutal - an uncompromising belief in individualism, a contempt for altruism and a belief in Greed.

And what is the opposite of Greed? Generosity? Apathy? Maybe it's thrift, the great Victorian virtue, or sustainability, the great virtue of our time. What would the “Greed is good”-ers as say? They might say at the simplest and most obvious level, if we all patched and mended our clothes, recycled, reduced our upgrades on technology, cars, and every other damn thing - we'd imagine that we were helping save the world. But they would say we'd also be sending millions into unemployment around the world. Our participation in the greedy game of consumption keeps our fellow humans in work and prosperous, or at least on the path to prosperity.

And if the opposite of Greed is generosity, here Ayn Rand waxed charming on that subject:
It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for competence. Such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.
There's a hardness there that reminds me of some of my Marxist friends at university who tried to persuade me that charity was repressive; that charity did the work of capitalism. So long as the poor and disenfranchised were lulled and patted by charity, the less likely they would be to rise up to free themselves, they argued. Charity and philanthropy are oppressive, therefore, and a hindrance to the necessary revolution.

“That’s all very well” I used to wail, “but passing by on the other side when a fellow human is in pain or need!”

Both full on Randians and Marxists - such complete and incompatible opposites as they would believe themselves to be - share a similar sternly rational and deeply materialistic outlook. They are like denied that there is any morality other than the needs of the self - on one side - or of the state on the other. For Rand, self-Greed is good; for Marx, state-Greed is good. Above all, they share an absolute contempt for the woolly, soft, bleeding heart, hand ringing liberal, the progressive, the social Democrat, the compromiser, the pragmatist, the free thinker - and for that matter, the pious, charitable person of faith. I confess to belonging to that weedy, uncertain, and hapless breed of liberals, so despised by – well, by everyone at the moment.

Liberal intellectuals, liberal lovers, liberals of any kind are “elite loser hypocrites, driven by either guilt or some kind of virtue signalling urge to occupy a high moral ground.” Of course, we don't feel that, and we don't think that love, kindness charity - as Rand puts it - are such feeble human attributes as she and Marxists would have us believe. But there's no denying that our viewpoint is increasingly out of favour, derided and shut out.

But suppose Rand and her adherents are right. Suppose such wishy-washy progressive ideas as - diluting capitalism into a mixed economy, taxing the billionaires at higher rates and intervening to regulate the markets - suppose such policies really do shrink the economy and therefore functionally impoverish the majority: all for the price of hacking down the super-rich. Easy for us to dismiss their Greed and self-interest as bad, but suppose Rand was right and it's actually good?

Well, influential figures on the Left, like Thomas Piketty and Rutger Bregman don't believe that. But for every social Democrat economist, you can find an equally vocal free marketeer to disagree.

Which leaves us amateurs with a serious question to ask: are the compassion, empathy, sorrow, fellow-feeling, desire to sucker, heal and help others less fortunate than ourselves, either useless sticking plasters that cover the real systemic problems - as a communist would have us believe - or are they self-indulgent barriers to the success, achievement and wealth creation that will benefit all - as a Randian would believe?

Hmm, maybe it's just DNA. It seems that some research suggests there may indeed be a genetic basis for Greed. It is possible that people who have a shorter version of the so-called “ruthlessness” gene – AVPR1A - may behave more selfishly, At the Hebrew University in Israel. Professor Richard Epstein and his colleagues - according to a 2008 article in Nature Magazine - decided to look at AVPR1A because it is known to produce receptors in the brain that detect vasopressin – a hormone involved in altruism and pro-social behaviour. So, Greed could be a congenital suppression of altruism. Altruism itself is no more than a genetically evolved attribute, found, not just in homo sapiens, but in many species of socialising and colonising animals - from termites to vampire bats, dolphins, and buffalo. If you weren't born with that version of the ruthlessness gene, you can read Ayn Rand all day long and it won't convince you that Greed is good. If you do have it, you can read as much progressive literature or indeed as much New Testament as you like, and you'll never be altruistic.

I, and maybe you, sincerely don't believe that such reductionism tells the whole truth, which is not to say it won't play a part. As social animals, we tamp down the wilder fires of our lusts, drives and impulses all the time. There truly would be no such thing as society if we couldn't. But here's the thing: many thinking people would argue that all of these political and economic philosophies are utterly and fatally irrelevant. They are outdated, dangerous, and catastrophic. For neither Randianism nor Marxism nor bleeding heart, progressive liberalism in the middle, do anything to address the only Greed that counts: the Avarice that is destroying our planet day by day, and ensuring that children born roundabout now have a very reduced chance of being able to live at all in the future, let alone live with prosperity and individual autonomy.

This reading tells us we're all greedy and that our Greed is not good. Unless you're a cockroach, bacterium or hardy acacia, capable of weathering the coming apocalypse of desertification and doom, that is, in which case you are laughing!

We're screwed, so we might as well screw! It's lust next time. See you then. Wear a cap or condom!
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Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

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Duplicate post - Oops, I somehow pasted the first post here when trying to fix the weird characters…
Last edited by StevieG on Mon Apr 10, 2023 11:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

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A very interesting and well thought out introspection. I find myself in agreement with so much of this. As a typical human I find that at any given minute I am kind, compassionate, loving, giving, loyal, etc etc only in the next to be mean, indifferent, hateful, greedy, and of course flawed. Even on this site, there are seasons when I am more middle than anywhere else and I find the good in everyone's ideas, only to have a season where I am the opposite and I entrench myself in my corner where if you dare to encroach I will find a way to make light of your thoughts and ideas and more than willing to push you away rather than listen.

We look at the world with our own worldviews that are ever changing and we find ourselves being led along. We see our "side" losing and we fight tooth and nail to bring it back to what we consider normal... but what is normal? I look back over the decades and see where we have made so much progress but at what cost? Have we lost the ability to empathize with each other? The opening of pandora's box (so to speak) of the internet and social media has not brought us closer but rather it has pushed us into camps. It has created a self imposed thought bubble, where we only hear our own ideas reflected back at us, with no regard for anyone else, or other ideas. Sadly our govts reflect that back at us. The more radical, the more entrenched we are, the more radical, the more entrenched they are. And how could they not be? The are our representatives, elected to represent our thoughts and ideas.

I don't have a good answer except that it has to start with each one of us. In our little bubbles. And we have to have that person that speaks truth into our lives and not just reflect back at us what we just said. Its not impossible. The hard part is getting enough of "everyone" to do so in our daily lives that the reflection in our world changes. And then we find a way to pass that on to the next generation and the next.

A bit of a ramble but those were the thoughts juggled loose by your posts of Part 1 and 2.
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Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

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StevieG wrote: taboo busting white knights of the cross ... stand for ordinary people ... tired of the failures, the moral relativism ...
Against them ... illiberal liberals, intolerantly fixated ... impenetrable academic jargon and prone to gabbling .... comically sanctimonious and barely literate babble
Well, I am glad that the author has made it clear that his point of view is far right conservatism.
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I think the author was trying to show the two ends.
I and millions like me do not have a place on either side. You can find us cowering down in the ravine below while the armies clash, clatter, and screech above.
And then the descriptions of the two sides in the authors view.
And what are these two mighty clashing forces? On the one side arrange the newly energised battalions of the populist right, or Alt-right, or nativist right for whom what they call political correctness, globalism, internationalism, and the ideals of social justice, are dragons to be slain by their fearless taboo busting white knights of the cross. They claim to stand for ordinary people, tired of the failures, the moral relativism and all the virtue signalling pieties of progressive politics, and to champion values that often magically combine Christianity or even Buddhism with anti-state libertarianism.

Against them, across this ever-widening fissure, amass the armies of a new ideological left, a generation of illiberal liberals, intolerantly fixated on identity politics, semi schooled in impenetrable academic jargon and prone to gabbling about things like “cultural appropriation” and the “heteronormative patriarchy” in comically sanctimonious and barely literate babble. Champions and orators on both sides take far more time, and derive far more pleasure, in riding out to mock the opposition's mouthpieces and spear their sacred cows than they do in making any real effort to explain a credible alternative agenda or present anything like a thought through manifesto, credo or, or philosophy.
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His point of view is not far-right conservatism. He's more "liberal" from what I read:
Above all, they share an absolute contempt for the woolly, soft, bleeding heart, hand ringing liberal, the progressive, the social Democrat, the compromiser, the pragmatist, the free thinker - and for that matter, the pious, charitable person of faith. I confess to belonging to that weedy, uncertain, and hapless breed of liberals, so despised by – well, by everyone at the moment.

Liberal intellectuals, liberal lovers, liberals of any kind are “elite loser hypocrites, driven by either guilt or some kind of virtue signalling urge to occupy a high moral ground.” Of course, we don't feel that, and we don't think that love, kindness, charity - as Rand puts it - are such feeble human attributes as she and Marxists would have us believe. But there's no denying that our viewpoint is increasingly out of favour, derided and shut out.
It may come across better in the spoken version, but he is putting himself in both shoes, so to speak, to explore the 7 "sins."
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SoulBiter wrote: I think the author was trying to show the two ends.
I am sure.

"I am not going to take sides, neither with the noble, heroic, and good looking heroes, nor with the slimy, despicable, and cruel-hearted villians."

:lol: :lol:
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Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

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Lust – Part 1

Content warning: Some may find this material confronting - Stephen Fry does not shy away from societal taboos in his examination of Lust.

Here we are. Lust. You've been looking forward to this one for ages, of course you have. Pride and Avarice are all very well, but they're too prone to being abstracted into dry generalities. Lust is particular; Lust is inside us. It churns and swirls and growls and howls in our deepest recesses.

There appear to be more synonyms for it in our language than for most words: lustful, lecherous, licentious, lascivious, libidinous, lewd, loose, lubricious, libertine. That's just those beginning with “L” - must be something to do with lapping and licking lips. There's prurient, debauched, dissolute, wanton, fast, impure, unchaste, concupiscent, intemperate, dissipated, degenerate, sinful, depraved, crude, goatish, sensual, promiscuous, carnal, randy, horny, raunchy, pervy, naughty, nasty!

Lust. Lust shames us. It thrills us. It drives us. It defines us. It's wicked, it's personal, it's secret, it's private - but maybe it isn't going to be private for very much longer.

In the old days, they had the rack to stretch you out to determine the truth of your wickedness. Although desperate confessions of blasphemous lusts might come screaming from you, the world knew in its heart that admissions of sin extracted under torture could hardly be relied upon. After the rack, as Oscar Wilde neatly noted, there came “the Press.”

Now secrets could be extracted by research, dogged pursuit, rifling through personal trash, long lenses, phone hacking, and the bribing of acquaintances. But the salacious gossip purveyed by journalists and paparazzi was hardly more to be relied upon than confessions wrenched from poor souls under threat of auto-da-fé. No, the armour of personal privacy was still hard to pierce - and depravity hard to prove - unless a person's inner Lust was driven to outer actions that could be pointed at, photographed, and shared. The Lust inside an individual's head was still secret and hidden from the world. But now we are closer than we've ever been to a world without secrecy.

You only have to leave your laptop open - having neglected to hide your web cache and browsing history - and ouch! Mother, girlfriend, boyfriend, child, all might be able to see where your Lust has taken you. It's like that horrible scene in your dreams where you walk naked into a meeting or restaurant. Tweets and photos and other acts of social media indiscretion, continue to force us all out into the open. As so many have discovered - to their cost - social media messages never die, and one careless tweet can expose something deeply personal that may just humiliate or shame us into eternal flight from the world.

Many people are unaware - even now - that the details of exactly who they follow on social media are open and readable, easily tracked by outsiders. “Minister, why do you follow @Asian Nymphet on Twitter?" But that's nothing! We've all heard the alternately over-eager, or darkly pessimistic talk of the coming wave of AI, Bio-Augmentation and Brain Machine Interfacing - this coming revolution is commonly expressed as an existential threat to the workplace. In reality, we might consider the threat it poses to the “play” space and the inner recesses of ourselves.

It won't be long - really, it won't - before we all gleefully dive into technologies that will, for example, let us engage with, and operate devices, by thought alone. We won't be able to resist such a thrilling future. But think how susceptible that will make us to having our brains hacked.

I know it sounds scarily futuristic and an extreme scenario - unlikely outside science fiction. But a future in which our own brains go online and get plugged into “the matrix” is really not very far off. And if history teaches us anything, it is that whatever is online can always be hacked.

For example, malevolent spirits, bad actors, brain hackers - cowboy or corporate - may soon be able to unlock a very unholy grail indeed, and be able to see the actual pictures in our heads - or a rendered approximation of them. Imagine if someone could see the pictures that flash through your mind when you masturbate. We will never be able to hide the wicked thoughts inside us ever again. You doubt me! With fear and horror, you doubt me. But your wicked thoughts can already be tracked - in your computer, by someone who really knows how to follow the breadcrumbs you didn't know you were leaving.

The trail of lustful drool, shall we call it? So, it really isn't that great a step for them to track, not the computer on your desk, but the one between your ears. Everyone will excitedly sign up to brain machine interfacing technology because of the power and ease and fun and function it will bring. And rather than arrive with a fanfare and roll of drums, it will creep in incrementally as all such technologies always do. Like Facebook and Google, it'll emerge as a fun, benevolent, young, and vibrant service. Like them, it will be nominally free, funded by advertising, never evil, always on the side of the angels.

And as with Facebook and Google, we won't even notice how pervasive and world-changing it all is until it's too late to retreat. The advertising algorithms those two giants have now can eavesdrop and survey you in truly creepy ways, as most of us are already beginning to be aware - or should be. Automated code-bots read our preferences wherever we go. In the physical space, they track our phones in the real world - in cyberspace they track our every move in the virtual one. The moment we consent to the excitements of brain machine interfacing - and those excitements will be irresistible as new technology always is - is the moment we submit to having our darkest, deepest thoughts read, recorded - and if we are maliciously hacked - transmitted for the world to see, or stored cruelly away for the purposes of blackmail and extortion.

There is a credible way of tracing the history of technology as the history of the assault on the sanctity of our own thoughts. Ironic, isn't it, that it has taken us all these centuries to shake off the omniscient, omnipotent omnipresence of God, peering into our minds, seeing our darkest secrets and judging us - only to invent omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent machines to take God's place, and return us to the status of frightened medieval peasants, quivering in the pews, and crossing ourselves because we know that judgment and damnation are just around the corner, If we aren't very, very careful.

And how well we know the price of judgment and damnation. We already watch celebrities and politicians and others crash and fall - a new one almost every day. They are damned and cast into outer darkness because their thought-crimes have broken the surface - or on account of actions or the expression of ideas that are held to be blasphemous and heretical, according to our contemporary shibboleths and orthodoxies - and poof! they find themselves redacted from the world and from life and history. There's democracy for you!

The internet gives us - John and Jane Citizen - more knowledge and access to more goods and services than Nero, Napoleon, or Frederick the Great could ever have imagined. And now it has given us some of that tyrannical power too. Just as Roman emperors, despotic rulers, popes and dictators have always - with a swift downward jerk of the thumb - banished, excommunicated, executed, and exiled poets, orators and thinkers who displeased them, so now we - with a swift click of the mouse - can banish, excommunicate, execute and exile those who vex us.

The Sins, the blasphemes, and heresies of the 15th century seem quaint and silly to us - but will the blasphemes and heresies of our own time appear any less absurd to future generations or outside observers?

It's time to remind ourselves of the meaning of the word “moral.” Moral, morays, morality: these are not words that describe what is permanently, eternally good or bad. They describe what is thought to be good or bad at any given time. Morals are customs. They're not universal ethical standards that hold true at all times and in all places - If indeed there could be said to be any such standards.

In George Washington's day, it was, for example, deeply shocking, immoral and wrong to have sexual relations with one of your own gender. Indeed, it called for capital punishment. But it was not immoral or wrong to own slaves. Different times, different morals, different customs, different manners. The branch of philosophy called “ethics” tries to cut through the societal taboos, the customs, the biases, the morality of a given time, and scrutinise what is crucially and consequentially good or bad, despite our prejudices and instincts.

For example, many people think it immoral for a brother and sister to cohabit and enjoy sexual relations with each other. But if they're of age, and the brother has had a vasectomy, for example, then the one convincing objection - the chance of a malformed or compromised foetus - does not arise. Even less if two sisters or two brothers, or a father and son of consenting age, or mother and daughter of consenting age had a sexual relationship. For same-sex incest could never produce offspring, impaired or otherwise. What then is the true ethical objection to incest if the risk of inbreeding can be discounted? And yet our contemporary, social and cultural moral antennae may vibrate distressingly if we confronted a real-life example of a father and son living together as lovers, for example.

It would surely be wrong to ascribe our objection to a deontic fixed inner moral law. We would have to ethically unpick our objection and see it for what it is: a taboo. Peculiar to our tribe based on years of tradition, biblical instruction and social prohibition. In fact, incest is perfectly legal in plenty of Western countries. France, for example. And in America - Rhode Island, DC and New Jersey do not outlaw incestuous relations between consenting adults. Only inter-familial marriage itself is prohibited.

When we hold a thing wrong, we have to wonder whether we think it wrong because - as in the case of incest - we are so used to the taboo that we cannot shrug it off, or whether we have scrupulously examined the good or bad of an action and its real ethical meaning.

But these are actions and behaviours. Can a desire be evil or wrong? I'll return to that in a moment.

When I was growing up, the word moral had in truth only one connotation: a sexual one. When somebody was described as having “loose morals”, being “morally lax”, “immoral”, or “of loose moral fibre”, it was code for what used to be euphemised as libertine propensities. It meant that they were probably “living in sin” or promiscuous - what we might now call a “serial shagger.” In our medicalised world of syndrome and disorder, we might now even go so far as to describe them as victims of sex addiction.

It is unlikely that we would today, at any rate, use the language of morality to describe sexual promiscuity. In a period as short as my lifetime, a person's morality or moral compass is now more likely to refer to financial impropriety, bullying, or bigotry than to behaviour in the bedroom. For the most part, we would say that this is the result of a finer ethical apprehension of the world. Others might argue that we have replaced one set of prejudices, one set of ethical assertions, one moral code, with another, no less arbitrary and overbearing.

We now believe that suppression, prudery, guilt, and shame are more harmful sins than the sin of Lust. But we cannot know what future generations might think and how harshly they will judge and mock our certainties. Precedent tells us that we can be fairly sure that almost everything we Tweet or cheerfully exchange by Email or WhatsApp today, will be accounted darkly immoral and bestially wrong in the years to come. Hey ho: ‘twas ever thus.

Meanwhile, what of what goes on inside us? We Lust. We all Lust. We know that this is not the same as love. Love is fine, noble, spiritual, and clean. It is an ideal. It can find expression in sensual physical acts of union - of course it can - but it is far from limited to those.

The Greeks had different names for different kinds of love: Philia for friendship and loyalty, as in Anglophile or philanthropy; Storge for the tenderness and affection felt between children and parents, for example; Agape - spiritual love; and Eros for sexual, physical love and Lust. We get our word erotic from Eros, of course.

Never before in our history have we had so much access to free and unapologetically explicit erotic imagery, writing, photography, film, graphics, devices, and soon autometer of an Android or robotic kind. It is as if the current generations - those born after 1990, say - are the subjects of an enormous experiment whose results we can only guess at. Will the young, brought up in the world of Porn Hub and its kin, have a fresher, healthier, easier approach to the erotic in life - less neurosis concerning the sexual side of their natures? One could reason that this should be so. Or will they grow up desensitised; in need of more and more intense, detailed, realistic, and extreme imagery? At worst, might it lead to greater impulses to objectify, to take unasked; to molest and rape? Others might reason that this should be so. Only careful research and honest empirical analysis will tell us one way or the other.

At the moment I'm noticing studies that appear to show young people now have less sex than the generations before - whether that's because they're scared of relationships, or so burdened by debt, or so wanked out by their online jauntings, I can't tell. But I return to the question I just asked: can a desire be evil or wrong? If a desire, a fantasy played out in the mind, has no consequences - other than perhaps the frustration of being unrequited and unrealised ,or being made so public is to be an embarrassment to the object of that desire - then how, you might argue can it be sinful to Lust?

We know Jesus said that a sin committed in the head was as bad as one committed in fact; that to look lustfully was as bad as to commit adultery - or as he puts it in the authorised version:
That whosoever looketh on a woman to Lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.


He had a solution for that:
If thy right eye offend thee - pluck it out! And cast it from thee. For it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into Hell.
Most of us would surely reject such a notion of a “thought-crime” and ask Jesus to get some fresh air and have a word with himself. To us, the only likely sin in looking at a woman lustfully would be to do so in such a way that she couldn't help noticing, and which would discomfort or threaten her.

That would be a crime according to contemporary moral thought and feeling. But to criminalise thinking doesn't fit the consequentialist tenor of our times. How can it be as bad to think of stealing a car, for example, as actually to deprive a person of one? Or thinking of punching someone in the face? Surely, as Shakespeare has characters say more than once: thought is free. Of course, we must face the truth that the Lust that urges us to engage in pornography as a viewer of content does have consequences.

By watching free pornography in particular, you are contributing to a current crisis of dwindling income for porn actors. Do listen to John Ronson's superb podcast series The Butterfly Effect to get a sense of this (available where you found this podcast). In the same way that a Coke user is contributing to the violence and corruption in the Narco trade, so by using online porn, you are contributing to all the variants of deleterious consequence, blow back and difficulty that are experienced by sex performers around the world.

And that, of course, is just adult consensual pornography. We know of the unspeakable harm done by what seems to be a bewildering and depressing upward trend in child pornography, and those impressed into sexual slavery around the world.

(continued in part 2...)
Hugs and sh!t ~ lucimay

I think you're right ~ TheFallen
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Fist and Faith
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Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

Post by Fist and Faith »

Ayn Rand had some really great ideas, and wrote them well. Rearden's trial says some of it wonderfully.

Unfortunately, she was also a little bit out of her mind in some areas. Good Lord, what she wrote about her characters who are in love is insane.
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest
-Paul Simon
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