#christopher degroot

[arcticdementor]

by Christopher DeGroot

[arcticdementor]

All this quasi-morality is ultimately a kind of vague substitute for Christianity, its primary function being that it enables everybody to overlook the boundless egoism that is the essence of every workplace. The ignoble charade, any non-idiot can see, consists of pretending that we are all friends, or members of a family, or as the unbearably trite corporate types say, “good team members.” As in Europe, Christianity is gradually on the way out in America, so we should expect the workplace to become more and more suffused with this curious blend of Protestant priggishness and progressive ideology. After all, we must have some form of collective “morality,” at least until we kill each other off for diversity’s sake!

Christopher DeGroot, “The Truth About Progressive Companies”

[arcticdementor]

If, as many geniuses have believed, civilization depends on individual restraint, then in order to maintain restraint, we require certain outlets for the primordial feelings of anger, aggression, and resentment that we experience throughout the course of life. Premodern societies, with their frequent wars, provided more opportunities for discharging these impulses. By contrast, in our feeble, post-Christian country, anyone who is what used to be called a plain dealer—honest, frank, and direct—may be thought to have “anger management issues,” to engender “a hostile work environment,” to have “oppositional defiant disorder,” or God-knows-what. Therefore, although our therapeutic culture values nothing so much as the individual’s feelings, there is still a lot of repression as regards negative emotions.