Vindictive Morality is Going to Get Us All Killed
Our culture has weaponized virtue.

Jessica Wildfire
Follow
Mar 19 · 7 min read

Archv
Her ex-husband changed his mind at the last minute. He wasn’t going to let their daughter spend the weekend with her friends after all. Instead, they were going to bond. When she asked him why, he said the girl needed to spend more time with her father.
“We’ve been neglecting our family values,” he said. Of course, my friend’s ex wound up not spending any time with his daughter at all. He took his new girlfriend to an indoor fun park, and she tagged along. Eventually, his daughter disappeared. While staff were roaming around looking for her, the ex sat on a bench and complained about his marriage.
That’s what family values mean to many Americans, letting your daughter wander maskless through a fun park during a pandemic while feeding your new girlfriend cotton candy.
Clearly, my friend’s ex didn’t want to spend time with his daughter. He wanted to punish her for choosing her friends over him.
He succeeded.
She had a miserable night.
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, Robert Aaron Long was trying to purge himself of his s** addiction by murdering women at spas and massage parlors. According to police, these spas were “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” Apparently, it never occurred to Long to see a therapist, or pick up a self-help book. Nope, his first thought was to go out and buy a handgun, and then go on a shooting spree. That’s what our dominant culture still teaches men, to solve their problems by punishing women. Long is just an extreme example of the violence we witness every day.
Maybe you don’t see much in common between a deadbeat dad and a mass shooter. I assure you, they have everything in common. They both practice vindictive morality. It’s a problem, especially for women — or anyone who can be turned into a scapegoat.
I’ll explain.
Vindictive Morality Bypasses Personal Responsibility
Genuine morality involves a deep, sincere sense of personal responsibility for your own actions. You follow the core western monotheistic principle of judging yourself before judging everyone else. You hold yourself to a higher standard. You focus on staying consistent with your own beliefs. You practice self-awareness and reflection, and you always try to understand how your actions affect those around you.
Sounds great, right?
In other words, you try to mind your own business. You don’t concern yourself with what other people might be doing, unless it presents an immediate threat to you or someone you care about.
Vindictive morality goes against all of that. You see it a lot in the Westboro Baptist types. They assume they’re inherently right, and morally superior to everyone else. They’re pure.
The only way they could possibly do something wrong is if an outside influence corrupts their immortal soul. Of course, this is always happening in their mind. They’re in an endless war against sin.
Vindictive morality is a way of not taking responsibility for your own actions. It’s a way of attributing any bad thoughts you might have to some external source, thus maintaining the illusion that you’re truly an innocent little kid at heart, incapable of malice. If they wind up hurting someone, then it’s always someone else’s fault.
It’s one of the oldest stories in the book. And that book is the bible.
Vindictive Morality Enables Hypocrisy
It’s weird. The ones who talk the most about morality and virtue tend to be the ones who go around shooting everyone and going on crusades to rid the world of what they call evil. They almost always wind up being the exact thing they preach so hard against.
The logic of vindictive morality originated in evangelical christianity, but it weaves all the way through secular American culture. Even Ted Bundy tried to blame everything on p***, rather than admit he was a psychopath enabled by a patriarchal culture that seeks to keep women in a perennial state of shame and fear.
Here’s how vindictive morality works:
Someones sees something they hate in themselves. Instead of dealing with it, they project it onto everyone else. They reject the idea that everyone has inclinations and impulses we have to learn how to control. They try to shortcut their personal growth and self-discipline, by accusing other people of infecting them with bad thoughts.
They accept a prefab moral guidance system that relies on the most simplistic, binary view of the world. Finally, they decide they can only be happy and fulfilled if there’s no hint of temptation to sin. Everyone and everything has to reinforce their value system constantly. Otherwise, they’re at risk of doing something awful.
That’s how you wind up with deadbeat dads who force their families to do things they don’t want to for the sake of “family values.” Push them far enough, and they’ll go out and buy a handgun to protect themselves from the world’s evils. Acts of white violence like mass shootings have this thought pattern branded right into them. They’re morally motivated, even if nobody wants to admit it. They’re trying to save the world from sin.
None of them seem to understand…
They’re the sin.
Vindictive Morality Punishes Pleasure
Robert Aaron Long believed he was addicted to s**, which made his soul corrupt, and it justified murdering women.
His parents probably played a role in creating this toxic attitude. After all, it’s why they kicked him out of the house instead of trying to help him with his confused attitudes toward s** and gender. It’s not so different from people I know who call drug addiction “selfish,” and blame addicts for their problems, instead of looking at the bigger picture.
What Long dealt with was simply a more extreme view of what millions of Americans already believe, that s** and p********** are somehow inherently immoral. It’s why certain states still outlaw vibrators and insist on abstinence-only education in schools.
You can use s** to sell makeup and cheeseburgers. You can have s** in order to procreate. You just can’t ever enjoy it.
You can also see vindictive morality in attitudes toward any form of alcohol or recreational drugs. I have relatives who won’t even let you bring bourbon or beer into their houses, because they’re afraid to be around the stuff. According to them, if something makes you feel too good for too long, there must be something wrong with it. Instead of simply abstaining from it themselves, they have to make sure nobody else does it either — especially on Sundays. So you get blue laws in half the states in America.
In reality, addiction can form to just about anything. We attach moral reasoning to it after the fact. The key to solving addiction is to remove stigma and shame, not drown people in it.
At its core, vindictive morality seeks to deprive humans of anything that might possibly make them feel good, unless it involves inflicting pain and suffering on someone else. Video games allow you to beat up women and stuff them in trunks, but they won’t let you kiss or touch one.
That’s what vindictive morality wants. It insists on tying pleasure to duty, and if not duty, then violence and shame.
Vindictive Morality Exonerates Monstrous Behavior
About half the country likes to use their moral reasoning in order to inflict pain and suffering on everyone else. They see it as imperative to impose their own beliefs on others.
They think by cleansing the world, then they’ll cleanse themselves. And that’s exactly what drives men like Robert Aaron Long to go so far out of their way to punish people for their own problems.
Instead of focusing on their own actions and behaviors, they identify the root cause in something outside themselves — an exterior enemy that has to be eradicated in order for them to feel wholesome. They project this hate toward anyone who’s not like them. It could be women whom they call sluts. It could be immigrants they consider criminals.
In reality, they love the sin.
They hate the sinner.
Vindictive Morality Drives Our Politics
In the wake of the Atlanta spa shootings, an overwhelming majority of republicans in congress voted against the Violence against Women Act. They did so out of spite, knowing that a white man had literally just committed an act of extreme violence against women, using pseudo religious moral reasoning as an excuse. He blamed women for his s** addiction. He sought to cleanse himself through retribution.
It’s disturbing.
What’s even more disturbing is what a portrait this man paints of our entire social-political order. Politicians know millions of Americans use watered-down religion and bastardized readings of the constitution to justify their need for violence. They go along with it, because it keeps them in power. They’re always trying to pass laws that allow one group to use their own morality to rationalize human rights abuses.
In their world, no white guy could ever do anything wrong.
If he does, he’s got a good reason.
Even as our justice system indicts Long himself, our leaders will never indict the larger system of vindictive morality that keeps producing men like him. They’ll keep trying to criminalize every act of non-marital s**. They’ll keep telling people it’s immoral to think about s** unless it’s being used to sell something besides s**. They’ll keep making everyone feel guilty for wanting to do anything but work all day and then make babies who grow up to work all day and consume more plastic junk.
Vindictive morality is what you get when you cross religious extremism with predatory capitalism. It’s nasty stuff.
And it’s killing us.
Medium