Today’s discourse is typically moral panic, with a pinch of cherry-picked reality to support our side.
The right perceives certain groups and individuals as destabilizing and prioritizes protection, whereas the left criticizes a lack of empathy and emphasizes ethical progress. Both claim righteousness while selectively aggrandizing, an option only available on the back of established, robust infrastructures built by earlier sacrifices. (Morality over reality, luxury morals).
This mirrors historical cycles of societal introspection vs. external threats and should challenge us to reconsider the historically failed first-world perspective as gluttonously myopic. But we won’t until it serves us.
(a nod to Rob Henderson’s “Luxury Beliefs”)