There's one fiat currency backing everything in our world. It is called violence.Choice of lesser evil has been done by every single military commander from fucking stone age (example: let every women in your settlement be raped by your enemy, or many of your men die in a battle trying to prevent it). But suddenly, bigshots of a powerful space nation claim that choosing "lesser evil" is awful. What.
I'm not talking only about Star Trek. But many other media have similar, totally unrealistic and impractical morality.
There's this idea I saw too often, that fighting back against bullies makes you just as bad as them? What's this madness?
And that your need to help people out of goodness of your heart, not from selfish reasons. Well firstly, as somebody who was in a shitty situation, I'd prefer a selfishly motivated person actually fucking rescuing me, rather than do-gooders being unable to, or not receiving help at all.
I think it's natural and healthy for us to have some amount of selfishness. Like literally any communist country prove, you don't claim moral superiority and assume members your ideology are perfectly selfish. Then you get dictatorship and even worse class system, because leaders naturally get power. No, you manage this selfishness, rewarding those who are productive for society, and who do good for society.
You don't make society where an individual needs to make personal sacrifices (although those are needed sometimes). You make a society where benefiting it gives you a selfish benefit.
Now, the quoted poster was talking about Star Trek. There are many other problems with this anonymous poster. Problems that can only be solved by repeated harsh exposure to Clown World’s caricature of reality until he can understand both this world and any other world, including hypothetical fictional literary constructs that are nonetheless more genuine than things that aren’t built to be fake, starting with “quit humanizing NPCs!” That said, the quoted selection alone is almost perfectly accurate. Fiat currency has nothing backing it, while violence is more like precious metals with intrinsic value and explicit use cases. It is otherwise correct.
I have no interest in goyslop in general or Star Trek in particular. In fact, I’d go even further than that - anyone with any self respect will distance themselves from the west and will not trust the west because it is permanently associated with such soy and subversion. Further, it is not a coincidence that the only examples of positive future fiction stem from painful naivety - even most anime focuses on the present or past, which is relevant since the East respects the west more than the west does.
Literally every other science fiction work presents a very dark future. A few, such as Phoenix Rising Online, The Last Bastions, and Starshatter overcome this darkness to a point, while most present the dystopia without solutions. Regardless, even fiction only offers a positive outlook after you fight through those who would deny you your future!
Case in point:
If you saw pic related associated with a western name, you’d immediately assume it was about soy and subversion, the same as most of the rest of any genre it can be even tangentially be associated with.
Even when associated with an Eastern name, more than one person’s immediate reaction was to either question the need for “Noahide law depiction” or to insult the same. These are historically illiterate comments, of course - the rainbow was a symbol of hope and gatekeeping long before it became a symbol of jewish genocide in either of its subversive depictions. No one who knew me at all for even a few seconds would say something that fucktarded. And he has a far more practical reason for wearing the cloak - it increases all elemental resistances by twenty.
But I digress. The point is that Gerulf there, on the right stands against all those things and aggressively gatekeeps them out so as to protect his people now that he has a people. But even the slightest appearance of soy will disgust and repulse real humans, even if it is completely unfounded. Even before that - which is the third book in the series, no one would give an unknown western author a chance at all, all because of the title name of this article. In short, they ruined it for everyone.
But this isn’t about that, either, even though it is the obvious corollary of soy morality.
So first off, what the fuck is soy morality?
The quoted section at the beginning is a good example, but it’s incomplete. Here are a few more illustrations of different aspects of soy morality:
1: Cultivation is soy morality. If you have no idea what cultivation is… honestly you’re better off not knowing, but it works something like this:
You sit around breathing and doing drugs. Such either turns off your humanity, or it was off from the start. You also develop absurd amounts of power very quickly and become immortal, after which you regularly destroy everything within multiple mile areas of your attacks except for the target you were actually aiming at who either dodged it or took no damage. It is some weird caricature of Buddhist beliefs that if any Chinese actually practiced in this manner, they’d be labeled as a shameful display on their ancestors.
And no, Dragon Ball Z is not an example - even the villains agree to take their fights away from populated areas, and more to the point, they gain strength by fighting.
Cultivators are soy morality because they are a prime, textbook example of what would happen if you let soyboys have any real power, starting with the complete inability to realize the logical course of them doing so is that they destroy the world long before the story takes place.
But even if we ignore their inability to grasp cause and effect and choices meet consequences (they are NPCs, after all), the ultimate result of such a world is that nothing matters but you.
You no longer need food, drink, sleep, shelter etc so all the common people are irrelevant. Anyone weaker than you is useless to you. Anyone stronger than you, you are useless to them. Anyone around the same power is a rival, or more likely an enemy. It’s very zero sum, and even if NPCs were capable of making real friends, such a thing could not exist in that setting. In many cases, it is less than zero sum, as all manner of secrets are guarded due to the above, and their holders have a non zero chance of dying without passing them on.
Even civilizations are irrelevant, because you can just go meditate on a mountain for over nine thousand years, and when you come down everyone you knew is dead, the civilizations you knew are dead, and likely even the geography you knew is dead. Incidentally, the very definition of immortality in such a world is itself soy morality. Live forever but on a stagnant rotting world? This is presented as a good thing? The only way it could be worse is if you couldn’t be killed. Rootless. Eternal consoomer. Parasite. That is soy morality.
There’s also this false equality where everything, even physical combat is based off energy, so you end up with strong independent wahmans (also a shamefur display!) and combatants that don’t look like combatants. Even though it doesn’t have many other examples of the obvious Clown World stuff, in terms of how beings relate to each other, it can be thought of as Clown World turned up to at least twelve.
You can’t see the soyboys practice this one for obvious reasons, but they certainly do use what power they do have to create a dysfunctional dystopian world in which all that is good and worthwhile is destroyed - which is why Clown World only has bread and circuses, and those are also being destroyed by the same entities, so much so that the only good works are specifically made out of spite against them.
2: Harry Potter is soy morality. I feel dirty even discussing this seriously at all, but as I’m only using it as an example of what not to do, it works. I’m not talking about any of the retroactively added soy stuff, but merely the story itself without the protagonist centered morality.
One of the four schools graduated someone, who much later went on to engage in wrongthink so horrifying that most are afraid of even speaking his name. And then, just because Voldemort existed, and had been previously associated with that school before he engaged in wrongthink, anyone who was placed in their house after got repeatedly discriminated against by absolutely everyone except the one guy who tried compensating in the other direction. For daring to give those who were guilty of nothing save for being clever a chance, Snape is portrayed as a villain, merely because of that protagonist centered morality.
There’s a problem with that too - Snape’s mad that Harry’s father cucked him and takes it out on the boy which is also soy morality - group responsibility for things the group wasn’t a part of.
If it were a serious literary work, written by humans instead of NPCs, it would follow that chain of causality to its logical conclusion and realize it likely created at least a thousand more Voldemorts, all by demonizing innocent smart men until they became the very demons the demonic soyboys feared.
They’d also realize it was a story about an open carry school successfully stopping a school shooter incident, which is the exact opposite of the narrative they were going for, on par with going full “Starship Troopers” or “Keep your rifle by your side,” as NPCs cannot comprehend humanity.
Though, for that matter, look at how these “wizards” fight. Their “forbidden” spells are basically Power Word: Pain, Charm/Dominate Person, and Phantasmal Killer - aka, low and mid tier shit. And the protagonist is only seen as special because he’s the only one who resisted the weakest save or die that allows two saves to resist!
The spells they do use are mostly curses - good at fucking with or trolling an opponent perhaps, but useless in active combat. The most common spell they use is one that knocks the opponent’s wand away, which as stated is fucking useless however much they pretend otherwise. For all their sneering superiority, the average redneck completely BTFOs Pigshit’s School of Sorcery and Soycattlery.
Expelliarmus this steel toed boot from your ass!
There was this one student that was portrayed as an incompetent fuckup, yet he repeatedly attempted more effective maneuvers - either using his wand as a melee weapon, or punching his opponent in the face.
This is another hallmark of soy morality - they are unfamiliar with fighting at even a theoretical and conceptual level, starting with the fact that your goal is to defeat your opponent.
The lack of elemental projectiles and the like could be justified by the fact they’re kids not trying to kill each other. But if that were so, the most common spells would be things like stun or sleep - in other words, effective nonlethal tools!
You can see the soyboys practice this one now - one of theirs mentions Elon Musk, and then years later Elon Musk engages in wrongthink, so they seethe at that other author about something he couldn’t have possibly predicted. And the very nature of their seething is like the second part of that, except this artificial and unnatural world is dominated by the T(y)ranny of the Weak, so their ineffective means of “combat”, aka being triggered NPCs and swarming real humans suddenly become effective, provided you are invested in Clown World and its bullshit, at least.
Of course, if you are not invested in that carnival of petty bullshit, you view it as cheap entertainment, meme bait, and possibly source material. And that is what they are afraid of.
“Muh Doritos LMFAO!”
3: Capeshit is soy morality. Really, it should be the first entry, but that’s too obvious. Just look at your average capeshit. “Killing is wrong.” so they let some psychopathic villain give plenty of repeat business to the revolving doors of the legal system, after which they resume engaging in killing, which suddenly isn’t wrong, but it’d be wrong if you killed the killer, thereby protecting the innocents which is “allegedly” the heroes’ job.
Your average capeshit “hero” would be the one stopping you if you did the sensible thing and not let some insane supercriminal run amok, and instead attempted to lecture him on his squishiness in an exceptionally brutal matter. After all, even if the capeshit guy has extraordinary powers, very often the designated villain doesn’t, or at least not any that would render them invulnerable to normal attacks.
You can also identify this variety of soy morality right away because it will be those designated villains who are the only ones saying anything that makes any sense. But, by NPC programming, having a “bad guy” say something automatically makes those things wrongthink, and you’re not a wrongthinker, are you?
The easiest means of determining the problem with it is to remove it. What happens if you present capeshit without the capeshit? Well, as mentioned, most of these designated villains do not have superpowers, even if the designated heroes do. Or at least, they don’t have the sort that would render them any more resilient than normal.
So someone shoots the fucking fucker.
It could be a police officer, it could be a fellow criminal, it could be a concerned citizen. Sooner or later, rather than the best case scenario being that the big shitty gets a short break before the designated villain resumes right where he (or rarely she) resumes where they left off, instead the worst case scenario is that problems solve each other permanently, after which they are no longer problems!
Naturally, the practitioners of this and any other manner of soy morality seethe about vigilantism. Of course, this ignores the obvious point - vigilantism, by definition, is a failure of the legitimate authorities, including the capeshit entities in question. Otherwise, there would be no need to perform a job that has already been completed by another!
It also ignores the even more obvious point - capeshit is 80% Batman, and 20% all others combined. If you need me to elaborate any further, I award you no points, and may the Gods have mercy on your soul!
Some call capeshit subverted, but that’s wrong. Subverted would suggest it originally served a different purpose, and capeshit has always been corrupt propaganda. Though I am hardly familiar with any of these options, there are reasons why single mangas solo the entire western capeshit industry and win (named Demon Slayer for added KEKs), other Eastern works try better takes on the concept of superheroes, while various independent creators try redeeming the west while posting bobs and vagene.
The soyboys do this shit everywhere, so much so it’d be easier to name the places you can’t find this particular kind of slave morality, and it’d be even easier to name the places that actively stand against that particular kind of slave morality.
PRO is a good example. While nearly every other western entry and an annoyingly high portion of the Eastern entries in the LitRPG genre hits on every aspect of soy morality I described, and quite a few more I did not, PRO makes it quite clear men are intentionally isekaing themselves to get away from that shit and go live in a functional world, where they only need to deal with normal problems like hordes of marauding orcs, some truly vile demonic cults, and so forth.
And yes, that is presented entirely without sarcasm, because in healthy worlds, sapient beings understand that monsters exist to be vanquished, and so no one will demonize you for smiting demons!
Well, that’s the way it’s intended to work anyway, as along with the isekais comes a much larger number of invaders trying to shit up a long functioning and generally stable world with the same trash that already killed at least one world. Naturally, they are taken out. They even have an excuse for that other problem - the travelers, either isekai or not return to life when they are killed. So the lack of a permanent solution to this problem isn’t a matter of incompetence or pathological altruism, yet it still adds to rather than detracts from the dramatic tension as let’s be honest - most of them would never make it past the bunnies otherwise!
PRO is quite explicit about morality - smiting Evil is a Good act, and doing so long and hard enough renders you Good. Meanwhile, Holy attacks only harm Evil mortals, undead, and fiends… and all the soy morality practitioners, in any form are judged as Evil and smited.
That being said, Good and Evil are more about how you do things than what you do, as there are Evil beings that openly cooperate with the heroes because “it’s their home, too.” It’d be more accurate to describe it as a conflict between Order and Chaos, Civilized and Uncivilized, Culture and No Culture, and so forth.
The thing is, being sapient (whether they are human or not), they understand practicality. There are quite a few incidents early on where a seemingly benevolent offer is later revealed to be more practical - they knew Gerulf helps those who helps him and has a strong sense of loyalty but has never experienced it, so they helped him when he was weak knowing that he would help them when he was more powerful. And… he knows exactly what they did and has no objection, because he talked about enlightened self interest himself, making low order and high order goals align, and so forth.
PRO already understood this, of course - the world building is quite explicit that before landing on the current, stable means of managing things, they tried many things that didn’t work - and they learned quite early that men who do not have a stake in society will not care if it lives and might even wish to see it die. Turns out that prompting men to burn down the village to feel its warmth is a bad idea even if they can’t set fires with their mind. A lesson Clown World is learning the hard way, as any men worth anything are getting out at any cost and then fighting against them, if anything.
The thing that dead worlds don’t understand and living worlds do is this: the thing that scares them more more than anything else in the world is the thought of men simply not caring. A hungry man can be satiated, an angry man can be placated, but a man who doesn't care whether you live or die, who lives his life one day after the other, eating what he wishes, sleeping when he wants, interacting with the world only in the manner of his choosing in utter disregard for anyone or their traditions; that man is a thing so terrifying to them they dare not even speak of it.
Needless to say, PRO learned that lesson many thousands of years before Gerulf was even born, because having a bunch of superhuman, superpowered beings run amok… isn’t quite the shithole a cultivator world would be, but it definitely isn’t a place you’d want to live. But those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them, thus the need for gatekeeping.
Now, alongside men protecting their people out of enlightened self interest… well, I won’t spoil things, but there are two events in future books. One where some random traveler (Earth native, and not an isekai) demands Gerulf’s help about something that doesn’t concern him, and he laughs in the soyboy’s face. Another where some random seemingly helps him for free… naturally, he gets suspicious and spots the trap before springing it with his face.
Well, there are probably many more incidents like this, NPCs cannot comprehend humanity (or any other sapient being, most of which do engage in jolly cooperation), but the point is that anyone worth a damn will act to protect themselves and their people, but they won’t go out of their way for some random unless there is a benefit involved. And if you don’t have a people, as those from Clown World who haven’t isekaied themselves do not, that means looking out for the three most important people in the world - me, myself, and I. And that is vastly better than the performative virtue signaling act that will get you met with either incompetence, malice, or both. Hanlon’s Razor is backwards.
Suffice it to say that if the men of PRO were demonized for existing and living their lives, they’d fuck off somewhere else, orcs would raid Hillfar, but they’d play the card banned from all competitive venues for being overpowered - “Not My Problem.”
Sooner or later, many generations later, it would become their problem, and many generations after that, some based shitposter would find them consigned to the dustbin of history and would begin cracking offensive jokes about their demise. Suffice it say that women worth loving have finally been invented, and so none of that is a problem.
Now, contrast that with soyciety. There, you get amoral or immoral behavior, primarily because any real human (and even NPCs of rival scripts) recognize that it’s a petty performative virtue signaling act about appearing to be good instead of actually being good, and as such, the obvious manipulation is rejected and discarded. They understand perfectly well that Clown World demands everything from them, while offering nothing save for more demands, so the only winning move becomes not to play.
Luigi wins by doing absolutely nothing.
Much like pic related above, if you merely don’t fail, you succeed by default… in so much as you can achieve success in Clown World, at least.
The soy morality absolutely dominating Clown World demands that you serve your enemies at the expense of yourself, aka cuckoldry. And yes, that is the correct etymology of the term - resuming another man’s abandoned saved game is merely a symptom of the overarching disease.
In a healthy, real world - that is, the highest of high fantasies, helping yourself also helps those around you, so there isn’t a conflict. And so, when that help would come at a cost, men will pay that cost, instead of telling you what you can do with that order.
https://vocaroo.com/1co1dLsvsLuM
https://vocaroo.com/1ex56gMOd6HC
Finally, let’s look at how PRO addresses the original point.
For the enemy's world always has and always will be a world that can only compel, command, or coerce, never convince. And since manipulation requires they have something we wanted?
Violence wasn't the answer. Violence was the question.
And the answer... was yes.
An intriguing post, but I need to read it again. I like it. It's dense with information.