Morality Is a Veil

I want everyone to stop acting like they care about what’s right or wrong. About what’s harmful, what’s healthy, what’s better for society. Because in reality it’s always tied to what makes themselves feel seen, safe, or superior. No one’s actually looking at the thing itself. They’re looking at where they stand in relation to it.

I’ve said it time and time again: everything anyone ever says, is always in relation to themselves.

I’m going to use pornography as the example for this. You hear people call it dangerous, say it’s addictive, that it breaks down intimacy or ruins men. A lot of that gets framed like a public service message. Like the person saying it is trying to save others. But if you pay attention, it’s usually got nothing to do with the subject and everything to do with their position in it.

A woman will post about how porn distorts men’s perception of women. How it rewires their brains and makes them not attracted to “real women.” Meanwhile, every third post on her own profile is a thirst trap. Face angled, body turned just enough to invite imagination without accountability. If you said it was provocative, she’d say you’re projecting. That it’s for herself. That it’s art. The captions will mention growth. Maybe self-love. But it’s bait. That’s all it is. Carefully packaged, draped in deniability, but still meant to trigger the same feeling.

She doesn’t really care about porn’s affect on men. She cares that her man is looking at women hotter than her.

Porn is easy to blame because it’s obvious. It gives men what they want without the middle step of pretending to care. If she had it her way, she’d be the one they look at. She wants the gaze, just routed through the right channels. The ones that reward her. The ones where she gets to say it’s different.

If the real problem was sexual objectification, she wouldn’t be halfway mimicking the same energy for likes.

Then you’ve got the flipside of that. The men preaching about how porn is soul-draining. That it weakens you, flattens your ambition, takes away your manhood. You listen and start to think they’re talking about injecting fentanyl. The intensity doesn’t match the subject. Because it’s about shame they feel afterward, not the pixels on the screen. And rather than admit that they couldn’t sit with it, they assign it to something larger. They turn their own guilt into a philosophy.

For them, it’s about having a framework that explains why they don’t feel good about themselves, and why that might not be their fault.

Morality is a veil that turns personal discomfort into public virtue.

That’s always been what morality is. A mask people use to cover what they really want. Humans are inherently self serving. But nowadays everyone is trying to repackage their self-interest as some kind of code. They don’t say “this makes me feel insecure.” They say “this is wrong for everyone.”

It makes them feel less alone and gives them a place to stand.

You’ll hear people say they’re just trying to help. That they’re offering wisdom or offering truth. But no one gives truth without angling it. The people who shout about what’s right are just trying to wash their hands of the stench.

That’s why I don’t offer advice. I don’t correct. I don’t prescribe. Who the fuck am I to tell you what’s good for you? I don’t care about you. The second you start telling people how to live, you start lying about why. No one offers correction out of detachment. You only try to shape others when their choices interfere with the story you’re telling yourself.

You don’t care about what’s right. You care about your life being more palatable.

And so do I. Trust me I know that.

It’s not lost on me that I’m writing 1000 words about moral performativity because it bothers me, because it affects my experience of the world, because I need to make sense of my frustration with people's behaviour. What I write only applies to me and how I see the world. Which is my whole point. We're all doing everything in relation to ourselves, including writing blog posts about how everyone does everything in relation to themselves.

That’s the mechanism driving every moral claim. A person with something to prove, dressing it up in concern. Sometimes the language is soft. Sometimes it’s aggressive. Doesn’t matter. It’s still about reducing the chaos of other people so you don’t have to confront the chaos in yourself.

If they really meant it, they wouldn’t need the audience. They wouldn’t need the loop of attention. They’d apply their morality to their life and move on.

But they won’t. They need to keep performing. They need to feel like their opinion matters more than it does.

I’ve got nothing to sell on this. I don’t need people to think like me. I don’t need them to stop or start doing anything. I don’t need to make sense of someone else’s mess to feel okay in mine.

You know why? Because I don’t care about them. And neither do you.

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