Two Standards:

Jesus once said, "He who has not sinned cast the first stone," as a reproof against an overly zealous mob facing a prostitute. The crowd, realizing they were all sinners, ended up sparing Mary Magdalene and she became a devout follower of Jesus thereafter. But this brings up an interesting question:

If everyone is a sinner, how can we enact strict justice on evil doers in our midst? This would mean turning our backs on friends, family members, neighbors. People we don't want to see punished would end up being punished. Worse, no one likes a tattle tale. What if they reveal their sins to you in a spirit of confidence, and you betray them to the authorities, and the whole world knows you are the traitor who gave up your own friend or family to the stiff penalties of community justice? Beneath the weight of these two concerns, one must rationalize: "Well, these people aren't that bad, if you knew them as well I did you would know they aren't the bad sort of druggees or shoplifters or whatever the law was really intended for." Blacks have this issue down to an art, cops can't get any information from the black community about crimes done in their neighborhood. Better to be a victim of crime than be known as a 'snitch' by all your friends and family members. Better to be a victim of crime than have to betray your own kith and kin to the strict justice of the law because of some mistake they might have told you about doing, or you might have inadvertently seen.

The fifth amendment took cognizance of this. People are not legally required to snitch against their own husband or wife. They are allowed to keep a faithful silence where matters of love and justice conflict, and allow their higher loyalty to their family trump their loyalty to justice and community well-being.

The answer, in short, is you can't. You cannot impose a strict justice on a community that is full of sinners. This is because no one would be willing to cooperate with authorities because the price would be too high. They would rather bear the cost of sins than the cost of stamping it out. An individual faces the same problematic situation. If he has a moral code that clearly spells out right and wrong, it's likely he could find that every single person he knows falls short of it. Does this mean he isn't allowed to be close to anyone, that he has to pointedly shun them all as a method of moral condemnation? In the end the only person who would end up suffering from his righteous wrath would be himself. He would be lonely, but everyone else would still find others to hang out with, who were less judgmental and more tolerant of each others' faults.

The solution is rather fantastic. If people around you don't think a sin is a big deal, you can't make a big deal out of it either. Even if said sin is illegal, if it isn't condemned severely by the community, people must look away and ignore the crime happening in front of them. This is why people can take drugs, drink and drive, speed, jaywalk, litter, do any number of crimes and get away with it. The law code isn't the real law code. The real law code is what your friends and family would turn you over to the cops for doing if they found out. Everything beneath that is a sort of pseudo-legal activity where if you just don't act completely stupidly you'll get away with it free and clear.

Likewise, no immoral activity is really immoral unless you would lose all your friends and family members over it. If you don't face universal condemnation, you can behave however you please, confident that friends don't want to look like prudes and burn bridges over 'minor' issues. Only universal condemnation and ostracism is strong enough to deter people from immoral but legal actions. Otherwise they'll just swim with the other fishes and never notice whether they are shunned by some stick in the mud or not. There's no point going on strike alone. Only if everyone else in the business goes on strike simultaneously do you have a bargaining position. For the same reason, there's no point 'ostracizing' a person alone. Unless everyone gets behind it it has no impact at all, it just makes your own position, like the lone striker's position, that much worse. The sacrifice is paid, but there are no offsetting benefits.

This is why people need two different moral standards: The community's real-life standards that we are stuck with, and our idealized standards that an idealized community would live by and we wished we lived in. While in the real-life community, people must live by its standards, or risk total alienation while doing absolutely no good for 'justice' or 'righteousness' at all. However, this doesn't stop them from advocating for an idealized society and an idealized community. For one thing, this lets you find friends who feel the same way, and thus you can steadily convert the 'real' world to that 'idealized' world like a magnet draws iron fillings. For another, you just might change someone's mind, however steeped in sin they were at the time, and point them in a better direction. For a third, it gives people an accurate head-count of how powerful any particular belief system is at the moment. Since real life is all about conforming to the majority norm, how would we ever know what that majority norm was if people didn't constantly advertise what beliefs they wish they lived under? If there ever were enough people advocating the same thing to be a serious counter-force to popular orthodoxy, the potential for reform, revolution, secession, inward migration, etc all becomes unlocked.

There's no point calling someone who got an abortion a baby killer and spitting on them, all you'll do is alienate your community, even if the abortion was a far worse act than your incivility towards the aborter, because we have been trained to believe that abortion isn't blameworthy. But if you said, "In my idealized country, abortion would be illegal and the penalty would be death, just like the penalty for murder," you offer up valuable information and a way forward to the realization of that dream. People who find that ideal appealing could pipe up and say 'hear hear,' and if enough of them cared about it enough, they could go and make that country. Southern Sudan voted, by all accounts overwhelmingly, for secession yesterday. After being tyrannically abused and murdered in the millions by their Islamic northern Sudanese rulers, they were finally given 'permission' by the world community to break free and chart their own course. Secession is not an idle hope or a thing of the past. Kosovo, East Timor, and many other nations have separated from what were justly considered oppressive rulers in the recent past.

If enough people thought something was oppressive enough, and were organized and civilized enough to mount a serious effort to secede, with the will of the people behind them, anywhere could be the heartland of a new nation with new ideals. This just isn't the case, currently, for white nationalists. There aren't enough people, they aren't organized and civilized enough, and they aren't considered heroes like George Washington and Robert E. Lee and Sam Houston were. For now, all white nationalists can do is live by two separate standards. In one, they should integrate and be as normal and mainstream as everyone around them. They should not make a fuss about pro-white issues that aren't well received by the community, or ostentatiously shun or condemn people who are abiding by community standards but not utopian standards. They should go along to get along, with all races, creeds, sexual orientations, political leanings, etc. There's no point in not getting along. Since over 99% of people are against white nationalists, the loser in any eruption of discord will always be you.

But they should live as though they personally are already under their utopian law code, and never violate their own prescriptions, no matter what they tolerate among their friends and family. They should draw a picture of their idealized world to those who will listen. And they should stand ready. Because you never know, if Southern Sudan can get its independence, so can we. It just takes the right confluence of events and environmental preconditions to get people thinking along new lines and listening to new voices they previously ignored. If fifty million Americans overnight decided they were sick of liberals and wanted a country free of abortion, everything changes.

If you live in a country that's banned abortion, and everyone in that country has self-selected, fervently, to leave the pro-abortion country for the anti-abortion country, the stars have finally aligned. At that point justice can be enforced against any evil doer. Suppose you learn of a criminal abortionist. You could go turn him in, and never fear that you would be considered a snitch or a tattle tale, because everyone would be as appalled about the abortionist as if he were a rapist or a murderer. You could shun a woman who has gotten an abortion, and know that the whole community will be on your side and against hers. In fact, if you Didn't shun the abortioner, the whole community would shun you and her both. Which means the Only way to keep friends and family bonds would be to shun the abortioner. In the cover of the rest of the community, you could act according to your inmost wishes and exact justice on the evil doers all around you, without paying any personal price. When an entire business goes on strike, there's a good chance you'll get increased pay by the end. It isn't just randomly throwing yourself off a bridge as a 'statement' to the uninterested world. Save all the moral condemnations, all the snitching, all the prudery, all of the strict literal enforcement of the law, for when people have actively chosen to found a moral society. Until then, no one can be trusted to stand with you. Until then, you'll only be hurting yourself.

If someone has chosen, actively, to live in a society with certain moral codes, like no sex before marriage, they can be shamed for going against that moral code. They can be punished, they can be ostracized, with "What did you expect? You signed the contract to live in this society, and you knew what the law clearly said, you knew how your neighbors felt about this issue, so what did you expect would happen?" If today you tried to come down like a ton of bricks, even on your own daughter, for having sex out of wedlock, they would just give you a weird look and probably laugh. They could probably call child protective services and demand you be locked up for even complaining about the issue. This just isn't a battleground we can fight in. We must abide by community standards or be trampled over by them. If example and persuasion don't work, then disowning or disciplining your children will only end up hurting the parents while the children simply laugh it off and go their own way, confident that they aren't in the wrong, feeling no guilt or shame, and getting the sympathetic ear of all their friends for their plight.

But supposing an entire community of people who all agreed to the social contract were raising their kids together -- what a vista opens up! Your children won't be encouraged by their peers to do immoral acts. No authority figures will stand up for them or undermine your rules, education will reinforce what you've been saying at home instead of countervail it with 'sex ed' condom giveaways, etc. It will be nearly impossible to find any help for a child to act out on their destructive impulses. Their friends will shy away from it, they won't find any sympathetic listeners, and the law won't forgive any of their crimes or look away even once. Everything will be such a tight ship that they'll be afraid to do anything but sit still and be quiet until they're 18. :). In a world like that, not just sex out of wedlock, but issues like modest attire, no inelegant piercings or tattoos, endless issues could be enforced and parents could truly be parents again. Absent a world like that, it's practically hopeless to have a say about anything. You just have to gamble that your kids will turn out right because they have a good environment, good examples, and good genes. It might work. It could. There's no reason to let the world die for lack of children just because of fears it won't.

But how much better it would be to raise children as we wished our kids would be!

And how much better it would be if all our friends and family members weren't people you had to 'tolerate,' but could genuinely respect and love as morally upright individuals?

For now, just think to yourself, "these people are good at heart, if they had been raised differently, they never would have [become gay] [gotten divorced] [cheated][taken drugs] [started smoking] [slept around] [vandalized property] [etc]," and let it go. It's likely that everyone you know has some good points to them. That beneath it all, they want to be moral and virtuous people, but finding that so much is forgiven them, they freely do what they never would have dared to do in a different world. They properly feel guilt or shame, but not when no one is condemning them and everyone else is doing the same thing. They have hearts, but they just don't know how to love anyone fully with them. These things are all forgivable. Before anyone else, they were the first victims of this society. Sure, they go on to victimize others, but who allowed them to turn out this way? Their upbringing, their environment, their culture, that told them to do it all and never think twice about the consequences. Even a parent cannot hope to overcome this all-pervasive atmosphere that corrupts everyone and everything living under it.

Grieve for their lost souls, tell them clearly what you think is right and what you think is wrong, but let it go. There is so much evil in the world today that no one could possibly judge and punish it all. It is so overwhelming that not even Jesus could suck in all our sins and redeem us anymore. There's no point trying to follow in his shoes. Look the other way and find what good in people you can -- and stand ready for a better life. Pendulums always swing back and forth. Traditional morality has to prevail in the hearts of some people, somewhere, at some point. So shinjitai desu.