When it comes to generating content, the producer usually has to make a tradeoff. Staying on top of trends in the news cycle is good for clicks, but the cost is the loss of opportunities to deliver more timeless messages. Produce something evergreen, and you might offer a message humanity needs, but they’re not interested in hearing. Society’s profound need to rediscover morality can come across as moralism. So content like this is always risky. Still, I hope you agree that the West was built on the practice of virtue and the eschewal of vice.
Virtue is disappearing. Recently, we talked about seven virtues that are desperately needed today—and I’d go as far as to say that if everyone practiced them, we’d see an overwhelmingly positive transformation of society. Those seven virtues are: Nonviolence, Integrity, Compassion, Toleration, Stewardship, Rationality, and Justice.
But we didn’t talk about their ugly mirrors: the vices.
It’s not just that we lack virtue. It’s that too many people are actively practicing its opposite. And in the world of politics and activism, we’re witnessing a genuine moral inversion—young people are being raised to think that vices are virtues, and that evil is good. To see why civilization is rotting from within, we need to look each of these vices in the face.
Vice One: Violence
Violence always deprives people of happiness or causes suffering. Entrepreneur Chris Rufer put it simply: violence is like gravity—you cannot escape its consequences. The more violence exists in society, the less people can pursue happiness.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: governments are monopolies on violence. We tell ourselves that lawmakers and law enforcers are in the business of protecting us—but they’re fundamentally in the business of threatening us. If Rufer is right, suffering scales with the expansion of the state. The more it demands of us, and the more it takes from us, the worse off we become.
Vice Two: Corruption
Corruption isn’t just the absence of integrity. It’s the active practice of deception, fraud, and breaking promises.
And it appears to be contagious. We used to think of corruption as a sickness of the developing world—desperate people using whatever authority they have to extract from innocent people. But corruption has come to the wealthy West. It shows up in minor ways: ghosting a commitment, missing an appointment without a word. But it eats through civilization in catastrophic ways: mass Medicaid fraud, partisan money laundering, money printing, and institutional betrayal dressed up as policy.
Vice Three: Callousness
Callousness is not a failure to be compassionate—we all fall short of that sometimes. Callousness is the cultivation of an inhumane disposition. It is cruelty worn as a badge of honor.
It’s one thing to look away from suffering. It’s another thing entirely to cheer for it—to make cruelty fashionable. No matter where you sit on the political spectrum, the person who cultivates cruel thoughts, cruel words, and cruel deeds becomes malevolent. And when malevolence becomes contagious, cruelty gets normalized.
Vice Four: Monomania
Toleration is a healthy respect for peaceful differences. Monomania is its opposite: the way of the ideologue.
The ideologue believes everyone should conform to her vision of the good—that all the world’s problems can be solved by forcing that conformity on everyone else. How many people do you know whose first instinct, for any problem, is that there ought to be a law? A policy? A universal program?
Monomania is the vice of the activist class. It short-circuits experimentation. It forecloses other ways of living. And it trades genuine bottom-up solutions for the satisfaction of total control.
Vice Five: Negligence
Negligence is the abdication of stewardship—sometimes adolescent indifference, sometimes a serious failure of duty.
It tends to emerge in two predictable conditions: when there’s no real incentive to care, or when no one is watching. That’s why the political class thrives on failure. Programs that don’t work don’t get cut—they “need more resources.” Rental property deteriorates in ways owned property rarely does. City-scale negligence means more graffiti, more trash, more decay. And professional negligence almost always means either no accountability or no consequences. But it always starts within the person holding the office.
Vice Six: Casuistry
If rationality is the active pursuit of truth, casuistry is its perversion: the art of arguing away from truth—constructing clever-sounding justifications for conclusions you’ve already decided to reach.
Social media has turned casuistry into an arms race. Instead of reasoning together toward what is true or good, people trade talking points and narratives like weapons. Sophistry replaces inquiry. And politics? Politics is the natural habitat of casuistry. These are people who, in many cases, lie for a living. We shouldn’t be surprised when their reasoning reflects it.
Vice Seven: Injustice
Justice is fair dealing—equal treatment before shared standards, rules, and laws. Injustice is the deliberate subversion of that. And people practice it, often enthusiastically.
Whether through policies that explicitly privilege certain groups over others, or through punishment meted out on grounds unrelated to the actual rules, injustice erodes the foundational promise that everyone stands equally before the law. Politicians have come to believe that whatever law gets passed IS the rule of law. And so-called social justice offers no justice at all—it trades individual rights for group privileges, and calls that progress.
I stand by the belief that everyone practicing those seven virtues would have a profound and positive effect on society. But we cannot get there without first confronting something harder: the spreading belief that vice is virtuous.
And a recurring pattern runs through all seven of these vices—politics is where they get normalized. Where they get celebrated. Where they get institutionalized.
If that’s true, then we’d better start thinking seriously about what a post-political world can look like. We need to overcome our failures of imagination and get busy building something better.
But before any of that, we have to practice what we preach.
We have to be the example.