When the Penny Drops

Comparing Penny and Luigi.

Just a short follow up to my previous Substack today, which if you haven’t read I urge you to do so for a full description of my thoughts on the Hot Assassin bullshit.

It occurred to me that there is a representative difference in the reasons why normal people adopt a hero or support a person who has got into issues with the law and the reasons why ideologically programmed Marxists do so. These differences tell us in a very stark context some obvious truths about Marxism (and here I include every ideology that has followed and which adopts Marxist rhetoric and category labels as an integral part of its worldview, so it applies to leftist progressivism and elite Globalism too).

Look at the contrast in the reactions to Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione.

Daniel Penny was punished for stepping forward to protect others. Normal people supported him because his actions were objectively worthy ones and having people in your society willing to risk harm to themselves to confront a real and present threat is a good thing. In other words, the concentration was entirely on the actual circumstances and the existence of a real threat, and the thing being praised was defensive, rather than an assault for no reason or an assault for abstract reasons.

Everything was about what actually happened. It had a concrete reality to it. It never asserted that putting people you disagree with in choke holds is a great idea, or that all people who fit a certain group classification deserve to be put in choke holds. It was all rationally based on the actions of the threat and the defence of other people.

Penny is a young, fit, pretty good looking guy, and I don’t recall that ever entering the conversation or being the basis of support for him.

With Luigi the ‘threat’ was extremely abstract. There was no personal danger from a CEO walking by. There’s no argument of self defence possible, and only the most absurd, abstract justification of ‘protecting others’ that depends on a whole series of assumptions (like the CEO deliberately creating a high refusal rate for insurance claims out of pure malice that otherwise could have all been accepted and were valid). In other words, what ‘justification’ it can offer is purely ideological, depending on a pre-existing ideologically framed hatred of a class of people (CEOs).

All of the rational specifics have to be ignored to reach the Luigi the Hero conclusion, subsumed entirely by broad, ideology based assumptions. The exact opposite of the very specific reasons why Penny was considered admirable.

If you look at false reasoning generally, especially the most dangerous kinds, it always has this feature of being about imaginary threats rather than specific ones, about huge, broad, societal ills or existential worries (the planet is dying) rather than local, specific concerns (this man is threatening me and people right next to me in reality, right now).

The truth is that Marxist ideology and everything that has ever stemmed from it, including modern progressivism and globalism (ironically loved and supported by most CEOs) has always been an incredibly shallow way of interpreting the world, which removes all human considerations and all local and relevant fact, both moral and pragmatic. The Marxist ideology is all about simple categories that apply everywhere and define everyone without needing to know whether those people are individually decent or indecent, or individually good or evil in their actions. It’s not judged on actions at all, it’s judged on categories and identity.

So it’s hardly surprising that the category of ‘hot guy’ should matter so much more to Marxists than this individually being a specific case where the ‘justifications’ of a murder are so shallow and abstract. That’s no impediment to Marxist decision making. That is the BASIS of Marxist decision making.

Ideology and intellectual and moral shallowness are necessary to each other, the second is the condition of the first, and the first is the generator of more of the second. The problem of shallowness is in Marxist category formation at its very root, and is only made a little more obvious in falling into a hysterical form of love and worship of a handsome assassin. While that phenomenon speaks to the incredible moral vacuity of modern leftist women (and gays) and the devastating stupidity often created through indoctrination in the current education system, it’s simply another form of the pervasive shallowness of Marxist thought.

The idea that all human relations are definable by power and exploitation, that capitalist systems are solely rapacious, that you can reduce social ills to a single primary cause and simply remove that to create a utopia, is the same reductive quality at its core as the idea that a hot guy is a good guy. The two seemingly different reactions speak to a shared surface level understanding of everything, and refusal to look beyond the surface towards a deeper and more humane understanding of people distinct from base categories.

True moral judgement is far more contextual, and conservative judgement gets closer to that than any form of leftist ideology can because tradition is the contextual understanding of the ages, always placing a priority on action and consequence (and on local specificity) rather than ideological abstraction. If Penny had been admired purely for attacking a category (the homeless, or the black, or the mentally troubled) that would have been as vile as the leftist love of Luigi, but it was not on such a basis that people admired him.

Instead, he was supported not for looks or ideology, but for the act of defending people right next to him (including, we should probably add, black women) from a man actually threatening them. There was no need for ideology to intrude on that judgement call, whereas without sharing the ideology you can’t possible believe that assassinating Brian Thompson made sense or was justified and worthy.