Desperate for Righteousness

 A couple days ago Ginger read aloud to me a post she had been reading in a naturopathic medicine forum, and was in reference to an international organization of naturopathic physicians. The post was from a naturopathic doctor who was urging that all Russian physicians currently in the organization be expelled immediately.

Of course it was in reference to the "current war." When I heard the post, I burst out laughing. I explained how it was typical of these times, of people who are desperate for righteousness. These are the people who have no real system of values other than what is being fed to them by the media and the culture. They have no backing for their beliefs other than what other people on social media will applaud them for (or what they believe others will applaud them for).

None of these people had any interest in the Ukraine before last month, or would have cared at all for the people there. What are the problems of a bunch of white Europeans worth? Nothing at all--until they could be thrown on the fire as fuel for their righteousness.

These are the people who "addicted" to the ego-hit of righteousness from Trump, COVID, vaccines, masks, etc. For them, January 6 was like a drunken binge of substance abuse of righteousness. But the phony hits of righteousness don't last long. They are fleeting, and when they go away, there is a desperate need for another hit. Right as the "COVID-mask-vaccine" righteousness binge was fading, and being exposed for the phoniness it was, they were beginning to feel those cravings again. Then the war came and in lock step, they swarmed to put Ukrainian flags in their profiles alongside the preferred pronouns, like a heroin addict scoring a hit and pumping it into their veins in the nearest alley. 

The surprising thing about the post by that physician was the pushback he was getting. Instead of the round of applause he was hoping for, the comments sections was filled with skeptical WTF responses calling him out for his manufactured outrage. 

Ginger andI both concluded that we are reaching a critical point when the righteousness addiction hits are decaying away in real time, and no longer able to sustain the ego-shells of the logicless unthinkers. They look to their familiar celebrity icons on social media for reinforcement, finding only confusion because it doesn't feel the same anymore, as when they could browbeat anyone they disagreed with into submission. They can still do that on Facebook, but Facebook and the other social media sites are dying. They could never last. They were mass-media performance art, but the show is coming to the end of its run. The righteousness addicts know that they can drive anyone off Facebook, but they know that the world is going on without them, out there, and they are no longer the cool-kids party, but the butt of jokes. How do you come back from that, when you have staked your whole life's being into being in that cool-kids party? For some it feels hopeless.

In the meantime they are milking the war for all its worth. What a gift to them it was, to feel again the flush of being right simply by parroting the things that you know will get you applause on social media.