The Tyranny of the Kindergarten

The things that form the moral drama of adults are likely to be Machiavellian questions regarding whether the ends justify the means or Kantian ones as to whether people are ends in themselves or can be used as means to an end. They might also centre around conflicts between whether family, country or Mammon prevail over what is moral and just. These are real dilemmas that, by means of making necessary decisions and the choices made in those decisions, define the character and moral destinies of adult human beings. This is what makes life interesting. In order to make a success of the moral drama an adult human will require both conviction and courage of that conviction. He or she will need to be robust, prepared to make painful sacrifices and have great fortitude. Just as physical weakness will make viability precarious, moral weakness will fatally undermine their cause. Adults must be tough.

An increasing number of people never make it to moral adulthood largely because the adult world described above terrifies them. Remaining as they do, therefore, in morally embryonic form, there is added to their fear of the adult world an even greater fear – that their dereliction and immaturity will be noticed. Being despised is their greatest fear. Because of this they feel an imperative to distract from their failure. To achieve this they try to make virtues of the qualities of their weakness and vices of the qualities of resilience and toughness exhibited by successful adults. Then they condemn the adults on such terms so noisily that no one will ever think of looking at their catastrophic failure to attain to their own moral majority. To do this they create a code centring around gentleness and sensitivity, the qualities shown when dealing with children (like them), and impugn robust adults who they consider have failed to exhibit them in sufficient measure. Everything is about considering the fragile feelings of others. Thus, those who have not even mustered the courage to step on to the moral stage blame the real moral actors for being immoral. They contrive to execrate and demonise the qualities of boldness and directness they most fear in others and, effectively, seek to outlaw adult vigour and the condition of adulthood entirely. In its place they put a kindergarten morality resembling the enjoinders to playing nicely made by a playschool nurse. Looked at another way the morally bankrupt seek to debase the moral currency by punishing people who are morally superior to them. Descrying people with the proper human moral dignity and nobility that they lack their aim is to pull them down to the lowest common denominator which they represent in what they may wrongly see as a "democratic" act. The problem is there is no "equality" in moral worth. If you don't have it you'd better get it.

The problem is that there are now so many people terrified of growing up and taking moral responsibility that such moral cripples are now in charge and, rather like the plot of a John Wyndham novel, are exercising a tyranny over the adults. Being in the majority they have made their timid and bloodless moral code the right and only measure of goodness and evil. The proper reaction to this for the adults is to uncompromisingly blast this tyranny apart with the very vigour, similar to that of an adult musculature, such people have been unable to acquire for themselves. This can be done by doing the thing they are most frightened of; unflinchingly naming their moral failure for what it is and sending them back under their stones. The pressure is then rightly redirected towards them to grow up while the adult world goes on its way.

This is only what you would expect in the rest of the animal kingdom. Those who do not acquire the attributes of adulthood go to the wall. There is a moral Darwinism at work from which none of us, in growing up, is immune. Their attempt to institutionalise their own failures as the norm cannot be allowed to prevail as it goes against nature.

This is the real nature of the cultural and political wars currently being fought out in the Western world.