Deplorable Virtue.
There was a village, on a tiny island of the coast of Europe, filled with people. And these people were wonderful. They were loving and kind, they welcomed strangers, fed the poor, had no notion of racism, sexism and discrimination. These people lived virtuously, always improved themselves and their town; they smiled at Satan with devilishly good teeth.
They grew, into a town, a city, a capital. Their influence spread across the west as they conquered and brought their good-natured civilisation to the rest of the world, and everyone was happy. Everyone was always happy. Everyone should always have been happy, because they were virtuous. Of course, such was not the case. The kindest of all the people could still harbour the deepest and darkest of sadness.
Virtue, for these people, became inescapable. It became a plague that surrounded the people, a black fog that clouded their person. Virtue is not virtue if it itself is recognised as virtue, and the people of this country, of this hemisphere, loved to shout, to scream about how good they were. These few ‘downers’ saw it more and more, were outcasted, not tolerated by a society that tolerated all. Their righteousness came at the cost of others, at the cost of a crumbling nation, for those who tried to speak differently became branded as ‘vices’ to society. People became obsessed with being better, better and better, more than their peers and more than the brother they held dearly at their side.
‘I donated twenty thousand to charity last week!’
‘Well I donated thirty thousand!’
It became unsustainable, a well of infinite and insatiable kindness that ate away at the heart of goodness, in that generosity is only beautiful with a lack of intent to be virtuous. Greed for kindness became rampant, tearing away at the world it had built, to chase more and more; that kindness morphed into something else, it was discarded, and instead a status of your good deeds to society became known as money, as in doing so, greed was set as a staple of Britain, of the west, of the modern world.
Human greed is an unalienable fact, and building a society on the basis of goodness, fairness and virtue is impossible. Instead, as the great Alan Watts said in his speeches about being a better you, we should be diverse in nature, we need mean spirited people, we need hard-asses, we need the selfish, because one day they might turn around the greed that drags humanity down.
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