Morality is mostly an individual -- not a social -- phenomenon. It tells you how to be happy. It's a kind of (secret) key, (special) recipe, and (patented) formula -- a type of map, blueprint, and vade mecum -- showing you how to get the maximum joy, pleasure, meaning, satisfaction, peace of mind, etc., out of life.
Morality teaches you how to win the never-ending battle royal of good vs. evil, most of which is fought between the ears. Also inside your own heart and soul. In this war the worst, most treacherous, most diabolical, most fearsome, and most ferocious enemy is the low and ignoble version of the Self.
Morality shows how to tell right from wrong, and then how to do right, not wrong. No distinction and choice is more central and significant to intelligent life. No battle is more important, difficult, and fierce.
In this struggle, the individual's social obligations and duties are far less challenging and pivotal than his personal ones. Attending to the cynosural one is always Job One. Altho' few realize it, the self is absolutely sacred, peerless, priceless, irreplaceable, irreducible, and almost infinitely valuable.
Still, social morality counts too. Everyone needs friends. Everyone needs justice. Everyone owes society at least something.
To begin with, everyone needs to know how to identify, find, enjoy, and reward the good guys -- or at least the ones that have done or are doing good things. Potential and actual lovers, friends, allies, comrades-in-arms, etc., need to be located, appreciated, and exploited. Similarly, everyone needs to be able to ferret out, avoid, publicly condemn, and punish the bad guys -- or at least the ones that have done or are doing bad things.
Unfortunately, nowadays both intellectual and popular moral codes heavily emphasize -- and almost exclusively deal with -- social issues and take a social perspective. Even the proto-liberal Libertarians and Objectivists. And they do so badly. This singularly mistaken approach puts the cart before the horse, inverts the pyramid, and reverses cause and effect. The result is a world ethos remarkably indifferent, hostile, and deleterious to both the Sacred Self and his society.
Thus morality has a truly bad name today. Dreadful, really. It's almost universally recognized as being the enemy -- and rightly so. Morality nowadays is seen as the destroyer of both the individual and the collective. Good people hate, fear, and avoid it like the plague. Both intellectuals and massmen regard it as a killjoy, spoilsport, and garden party skunk that rains on everybody's parade.
Moreover, in today's terrible cultural Dark Age, morality is so divorced from all reality, happiness, and practical life that even the best of contemporary philosophers demand that you be good "without thought, expectation, or desire, of result or reward." They tell you that you should practice virtue "for its own sake," and that "virtue is its own reward." What could be more absurd and horrific than this?
The essentially monopoly morality of today's sad-sack, sick-puppy, bleeding-soul, post-Enlightenment world is the ethos of otherism ("altruism"). The other comes first. The other is virtually the only thing that even exists -- or at least that is important.
Both conservative and progressive philosophers and political scientists agree. The morality of anti-individualism, self-sacrifice, and self-destruction is championed by both rightist-type religionists and leftist-type welfarists. Ever since the 1830s or so, the old judeo-christiano-islamic world ethic has been joined, seconded, secularized, scientificized, and almost wholly legitimized by the new post-Age of Reason world of collectivist sociology and economics.
Nowadays crude vulgar people and primitive limited cultures think that Jesus and Marx are the same -- and they're right. The loathsome flagitious Jesus/Marx version of the desideratum of selflessness is now about as well accepted and admired as "the golden rule." And it's even more accepted and admired than the classic Greek ideals of "the golden mean," "moderation in all things," and "know thyself."
The Hebrew holy book -- regarded as good, wise, and authoritative by nearly all -- asks resonantly "Am I my brother's keeper?" Nowadays the question is rhetorical and the answer self-evident. Thus ordinary innocent hapless human beings are reduced to the level of zoo-keepers and their feral beasts. Or else to jail-keepers and their fiendish criminals.
Of course, our surprised woebegone wild animals and lawbreaking thugs do get the dubious pleasure of returning the favor. They get to be noble keepers too. Today, everyone is both master and slave.
This nearly universal and supposedly benevolently inspired otherist moral code and ideal allegedly makes people much more social, neighborly, friendly, and brotherly -- as well as cooperative and unified. The alternative--which is an ethos of individualism, self-fulfillment, and personal happiness -- supposedly makes people antisocial, unfriendly, hateful, atomized, and disunited. It also inclines them to oppose peace on earth and the brotherhood of man while favoring interpersonal, class, civil and global wars.
This same universally accepted and admired holy literature goes on to morally command "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Then "Love thy stranger." Then "Love thy enemy." What could be more perverse, bizarre, self-destructive, socially-annihilating, and limitlessly evil than this? No wonder everyone hates morality.
