The extreme depravity of modern Western leaders

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I was suddenly struck by an awareness of the unprecedented extremity of evil among Western leaders - at all levels, but the higher the level the greater average depravity; the fewer exceptions.

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When King Henry II of England had Thomas Becket (Archbishop of Canterbury) killed for reasons of expediency; he was stricken by overwhelming remorse, and performed extravagant penances which served as a public demonstration of his error. It is inconceivable that anything of that sort could happen among today's leadership.

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We are ruled by the Men Without Chests of Lewis or the Hollow Men of Eliot - or the Voldemort types who have deliberately fragmented their souls, or Mouths of Sauron who simply channel evil.

They plot and scheme to subvert, invert and destroy all virtue; they prosecute truth as oppression; and propagandize deliberate, sickening ugliness as the highest aesthetic.

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Yet they are utterly without awareness of their own depravity; regard themselves as the cutting edge of goodness.

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They have constructed a world in which their own planned and systematic promotion of evil counts for nothing against them; and where their restraint from following-through their evil ethic to its extreme conclusions in absolute selfish short-termism seems to them to imply an almost super-human innate virtue+.

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They have all this reflected-back at them in the media world that is their headquarters and which dominates and permeates their lives; a world in which traditional evaluations of truth, beauty and virtue have been abolished except to be inverted: the venom in excluding from this world, suppressing, misrepresenting, punishing the expression of Goodness is by now something extraordinary.

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This is, indeed, the most depraved ruling elite that there ever has been in the history of the world - precisely because it seems so impossible that they could ever come to awareness of their own depravity.

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For such people to repent would, of course, be a truly cataclysmic event in their lives; to perceive the sheer mass of their own efforts on behalf of depravity would be of soul-crushing force; it would be so agonizing that only Christian forgiveness could rescue them from utter despair - yet that was the very first possibility they eliminated, several generations since.

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The absence of nobility from public life; the shallowness of the people; the cowardice both individually and collectively - all these are aspects of this situation: the extreme depravity of our leadership, so extreme that their evil is almost unrecognizable.

These are such pathetic remnants of humans that we barely recognize the possibility of responsible choice - yet we know it is there.

In the vastly inflated balloons of conceit and artifice which are modern leaders; in some corner, hidden away, there is a pathetic whimpering child still capable of agency; and still choosing - day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment - to sustain the monstrous falsity of their empty lives.

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+ There are many examples in the realm of sexual ethics - when multiple serial monogamy is regarded as virtue compared with multiple simultaneous promiscuity; or among the multiply simultaneously promiscuous when being open and 'honest' about infidelity is regarded as virtue compared with concealment; or when multiply simultaneously concealed promiscuity is disciplined by some restraint as regards classes of acceptable partners (age limits, no orgies etc)... Every depraved individual draws a circle around, makes an ethical imperative of, their own limits to depravity - then feels spontaneously self-disciplined, relatively virtuous, superior to (some) others. Mutatis mutandis wrt dishonesty etc. - for instance, there is little to compare with the incredulous moral indignation of the systematically dishonest administrator, manager or journalist whose entire professional life is spent misleading by selection and distortion of the truth - when they are accused of actual lying! 

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