“There is no one righteous, not even one.” (Romans 3:10 NET, quoting Psalm 14)
The human race is fallen. The most basic demand from God after the Flood was for Noah to institute social constraints on human behavior. Men were to get off their lazy butts, as in the sin of Adam in dealing with Eve, and take charge of thinking about moral implications to prevent the demise of the entire human race. The human psyche typically includes a measure of restraint, a superego telling us certain things might be fun, pleasant, entertaining or offer some advantage, but isn’t worth the other consequences. It seldom rests in our minds as pragmatic, but as a foreboding “ought” accompanied with feelings of guilt, etc.
No, morally mature people don’t need guilt and so forth to participate in preserving our humanity, but most people never quite reach moral maturity. Human moral development tends to slow down around age 6, and many never reach teenage skepticism. Precious few ever get past that to a sense of peace and purpose about things. Thus, we have a social structure which tends to create psychic barriers not easily crossed. Without them, there might not be a human race.
So most of us run around with a taste for things we’d never actually do or obtain. Within a given social context, those things tend to be illegal. Law is a moral statement of sorts. It’s a commonly recognized cycle that a society will be vigorous with simple and strict laws at first, reflecting the sort of vigor of something which is vital and growing. At some point there is a consciousness of prosperity and the barriers become more complex and fungible. At some point the ones that actually serve a purpose kind of collapse or simply stretch too far to be useful. Meanwhile, the laws that simply cannot serve any good purpose become so common that the society eventually breaks down, consuming itself.
That final stage is coupled with insane laws that attempt to reach inside the very mind. It’s no longer what we do that is illegal, but what we think. The final mark of social collapse is a complicated and utterly senseless orthodoxy of social morality that demands you confess your sins, including a whole raft of things about which you have zero interest in the first place. Your very humanity itself becomes illegal.
The Law God gave Noah presupposes you can only act on things people do wrong. The only person with any business counseling you on underlying immoral desires is someone who knows you well enough to recognize your tendencies. The Law of Noah also presupposes it is totally evil to farm out that responsibility — that fatherly shepherd duty — to anyone who isn’t direct family kin. No one else has any business getting to know you that well. You cannot trust anyone else with your real self. Anyone who isn’t bound up in your life in the first place, who doesn’t share your suffering, is damned for wanting to know.
That is inherent in the concept of “civility,” the term we use to describe any social milieu for restraining common human immorality. You could correctly say the fundamental Law of God for the human race equates to civility — Covenant of Noah = civility. Civility was thus defined ages before Western Civilization arose. This business of a godlike intrusion into your stream of awareness is a quintessential expression of Satan. Privacy is not a right; invasion of privacy is so fundamentally evil it transcends talk of rights. It goes all the way back to why God might destroy humanity. That we have a Western social habit of intruding into privacy, a childlike demand to know everything about which we might be the least bit curious — “What are thinking about me?” — is a symptom of how far we have fallen back toward the society God destroyed in the Flood. That we have so many willing to spill the entire contents of their stream of consciousness without any regard for privacy and civility shows another round of destruction is wholly justified.
Yeah, Western Civilization in general, and America in particular, is doomed. God’s wrath is upon us and we so richly deserve it.
