One Way to Find Virtue in a Very Evil World

This is one way, there are billions of other ways, I am a retired Navy Recruiter, and Personnel Specialist so here is my way.

See if you can find a half dozen people who have very strong backgrounds in being extremely well educated, and knowledge guided people.

Follow what they seem to be saying. For me, this includes Larry Kudlow, for sure, and Ron DeSantis, and Laffer, and three more, so I follow what they say from day to day.

Now, frame a path for your own conduct that is informed and guided by what the persons of sound thinking and good habits say. You seek out the best and copy the best.

Do this for 20 years. At some point your conduct will be your instructor in virtue. You will learn from your own self, as it went through many situations — your own book of changes, guided by the best you could find.

So now you have your black belt in decent conduct. That means you are a teacher. Your excellence is your shiboleth, it is the basis for your entry into the republic of letters.

Be what you are. A lighthouse. A landmark. A beacon. A guide to aviators as they navigate.

This is not so easy in a world that grows more evil at a power rate. Like x^2 or x^3.

Keeping your footing as an instructor of arete means constant self-awareness, and being your own toughest critic, finding the flaws, and fixing them. Stay in touch with your guide persons, listen to what they say, behave as they behave, think as they think.

Do not enter the zone of A Priori Pure Reason of Academical Abstractness and seek to find virtue using symbols from Wittgenstein, or Carnap. That is a path to being an educated imbecile.

Do not become a Green War on the Sky Lunatic. That is the path to doing terrible harm to your fellow humans right now for the sake of 3/100ths of a degree 300 years from now. The harm will never be repaired. The 3/100ths of a degree will quickly become not relevant, or not possible.

Do not imagine your path to virtue hinges on what you eat.

It’s your deeds and words that matter, not what you eat, or what you say about the sky.

If you make war on other people and harm them, you are not a person of virtue, you are a part of the general evil, and making the power rate higher.

Taking away the livelihood of another person harms them. Also cancelling them. Also, making them unable to put food on the table. If your conduct is that of a vicious Marxist, you are not a sensai of virtue. You are vicious vermin.

Let the other person make a living. If you don’t like drilling, do not drill. If no like fracking, do not frack, if you think abortion is bad, don’t get one. Have liberty, but let others have liberty too.

Do not become dependent on the Nanny State. Try to get along 99.99% Nanny State free. Be self-reliant. Be resourceful. Be resolute. Be thrifty, clean, helpful, like a good Scout — like an Eagle Scout.

Virtue is an old fashioned thing. So if the path sounds old-fashioned, well, it is.