From: www.ruthlesscriticism.com

Translation of an article by MSZ from www.gegenstandpunkt.com

I. On bourgeois freedom, its barriers and their confirmation by a moral attitude

The few things that really matter in capitalist society and its democratic state are not made dependent on subjective views about them or on approval by the people. That the most diverse efforts on the part of the “affected persons” and their obedience would be rendered in a calculated and conditioned way, thus always be revocable, is provided neither in the institutions of the constitutional state nor anywhere else.

In the companies of a modern nation, “work ethic” has become a foreign word: the achievements for which wage payments are profitable are programmed into the means of production – as a “technical objective constraint” which leaves little to be decided by the workers. A modern person does not at all need to specifically decide on being completely available for the “labor market” and the “employers”; the economic “objective constraint” of earning money and the alternative of impoverishment set up by the welfare state make sure of that. The state, which first sets up by force all economic constraints with its laws, really does not leave respect for its decisions up to private opinion. An existence outside the state definition of rights and duties is made impossible by administrators and police; they do not put their services for a bourgeois existence of all individuals up for a vote to anybody. A modern state power does not compete with its citizens’ alternative preferences, but regulates everything with acts of sovereignty. The whole thing functions without the politicians first having to persuade their enfranchised masses that they have to do their services. Not even the politicians themselves, never mind the managers of business, have to be sincerely dedicated to their “tasks” in order for the accumulation of wealth and the political subordination of the people to take their course. The competition of the movers and shakers among each other makes sure that no important purpose is overturned by a lack of “motivation to achieve” in important positions. Rather, the political power in the modern state and the social interests it brings into force determine the will of the affected subjects so that they no longer appear as the effects of domination, but as indispensable conditions for the activities of the administered masses. The compulsions of state power and the constraints of the capitalist economy are as unquestionable as natural circumstances – and, in this way, bring into the arena the freedom of the individual to see all these “self-evident” living conditions as means which “one” has no choice but to comply with. They offer themselves as suitable facilities – for a bourgeois lifestyle which is subject to no other excessive restrictions: no democratic authority dictates specific jobs, homes and family relationships to its citizens; arbitrariness on the part of the rulers is in principle replaced by certainty of the law. Each subject decides in these circumstances what really matters to him – and in this needs to have no further prescriptions. The acquisition of money and the permissible forms of earning it, the free housing market including social assistance, the office of vital statistics and the income tax code with its columns for “married” and “children” are made available to individual freedom as means of its pursuit. In this respect, everyone in the bourgeois class state and its economic institutions has in front of him a world full of opportunities – at most, differently distributed.

These, however, have the little disadvantage that they do not allow discretionary use at all; all too many are familiar with the experience that they do not reach their small and big goals in life. And an objective assessment of the “opportunities” could easily teach them that the opportunities offered to them are just the way they are made serviceable for the purposes of class society and its public power. Money and competition, rental apartments and pay slips, identity cards and social security numbers are quite convenient things – except not for the discretionary projects of a liberated subject and certainly not for the material needs of people who run through the world as comprehensively looked after and utilized wage and salary earners. They are the instruments of the interests of business and state power which frustrate the materialism of the masses – who are therefore called the “little people.” The conditions of a bourgeois existence in no way “entail” success, but guarantee the rule of capital and the sovereignty of the law. And that includes some adversity against the vital interests of wage workers and other ordinary citizens. The use of the economic and political “means of living” of modern society is indeed free, but for most ruinous.

Opportunities which hinder and prevent success in life: this contradiction wants to be mastered. Of course, those affected by it can draw a conclusion from this about the ruling purposes inherent in their supposedly so objectively neutral living conditions; and they would be well advised to draw this conclusion. Because with it the conflict of interests organized by the power that installs the law is properly on the agenda, and they only need to win the class struggle. However, then the strange paradox would be gone from the world and not constructively “mastered.”

The productive alternative gets underway with a mistake by the affected people. The subjects who fail with their free purposes in the available opportunities become skeptical not about the deceptive “means,” but about their own materialism. They call into question not the so very unmanageable conditions of their existence, but themselves in their handling of the not at all unlimited possibilities. And that is exactly how they look at the others who are in the way of their interests. They also enjoy the hot question of whether their successful or failed undertakings are really alright.

This question does not check the content that is inscribed in their own projects and the life programs of others. They search apart from it for a justification which is ascribed or not to all possible actions. This method detects beyond all determinations which can be identified in a business, a job, a wedding, a political action, etc., the always same quality of a good or bad purpose, to some extent a distinctive purpose which is to be decisive for all (non-) actions of this world. The standard which is applied to the judgments produced in this way is called value and has very little to do with the same hard economic measure of material wealth.

The need which guides the construction of this ideal criterion of everything is not difficult to identify. So righteous people speak up who orient themselves by the permissible and the forbidden, who meddle with their success in life always within the framework of the valid socially commanded means – and notice that they come into some conflict with their contemporaries over it. The ideal they concoct out of the adverse dependencies is that of a common good to which the conflicting interests so dependent on each other would have to contribute something. One’s own willingness to submit to the “rules” of state and market figures as the merit which one would like to claim as a duty from everyone. This is how modern people, contrary to all experience, assume a positive relation between all possible concerns; and they hold out this should against themselves and others because they want to accommodate to the real conflicts that they get to experience.

Their strange sort of (self-)criticism has its model in the idea and practice of the constitutional state, to allow or also not to allow all interests and needs according to the right and law of the competition around the necessary means, to set its power against some, to lend it to others. Everyone must put up with being treated as party and sovereignly restricted in the barriers of one overriding interest. Bourgeois people do not so easily let themselves be treated as subjects of the law. They are so free as to take over the restrictions put on them and play at being their own supervisory authority through the question of their own internalized standards of lawful and unlawful.

So free people agree to understand servitude as the paragon of their free will. Because it is service to act according to aims set by others. To do this voluntarily, to respect others’ purposes in principle, signifies servitude. To confront a person with the question whether his own purposes really agree with the goals of (all) others assumes as the greatest self-evident fact that a free will is only worth anything if it avows itself as subservient.

This avowal, whether one demands it of oneself or others or it is requested of him, is the opposite of the insight that modern people in the free use of the state-guaranteed living conditions are subservient – namely, they keep going a turnover of money and commodities, a system of wage labor, a state apparatus with sovereign power used domestically as well as abroad and similar “facilities” in which everything is a useful means, long before the subjects come up with their life plans – and are disgraced on a massive scale. To take seriously questions like “What do people live for?” or “What are my purposes good for?” as a theoretical inquiry and to answer them with an analysis of the market and state power would be beside the point, and on top of that would have to put up with the accusation of cynicism. For that leads straight back to the downsides of the concrete conflicts of interest and constraints where the exact opposite is in effect: the idea of an ultimate “knowing why” that goes beyond all real failures and captures every poor wretch as a free partisan of values who can’t at all fail in that sense.

The proper skepticism about their own and other people’s wills requires thus a terribly in principle “should” in whose name the free person in the first place really dares to act. With this auxiliary verb “should,” morality comes into the world.

II. On the hopeless efforts to use morality as a lever for failing interests

A person with morality has neither new needs nor – for the time being – other practical concerns than before. He has an additional concern: he does not want to let it be pointed out that his interests and hardships are “only” his. He sets the needs which he really has into a critical relation to a fictitious universal which should correspond to it: he interprets them as rights and duties.

The guideline for this stance is the law – not the letter of the law, but its principle: the conflicts of interests and the clashes between individual concerns and prescribed rules are not slugged out and eliminated, but are to survive under a binding decree “from above” and should linger on; the determining authority of all disputing parties requires recognition as the inviolable precondition of the contentious interests themselves. When it dictates victory and defeat, this cynicism of the law finds in the morality of those affected the most generous practical application. Nobody would like to speak up for his interests without at the same time appearing as the advocate for all the purposes and set-ups he comes into conflict with, with the gestus of the unaffiliated referee who only wants the best for all concerned. Everyone would like to bring his needs and concerns forward more dazzlingly and – more successfully. Modesty is suspicious of any self-interest as a lowly desire as long as no universal value has been found in whose service it stands; its flip side is indeed the pretension to all others, to be inclined and compliant in the name of the discovered universal value of the interest brought forward. In their well understood – that is to say, likewise morally reflected – self-interest, they should allow themselves to be taken in for the purposes of their opponent. Apartment owners raise the rent so that they can further offer every possible amenity to their tenants – decent tenants put their foot down with admonishments about the benefits that the home-owner would get especially from their first-class residential manners. Unions demand wages – if at all – only to secure for the entrepreneurs the sale of their commodities by solvent consumers – entrepreneurs reduce wages and the number of workers so that some can keep their jobs and the others can someday again be set in wages and bread by the upswing. The individual “wage earners” remind their superiors of the extravagant benefits that the department and the company get from their work – management returns the same lie and says it is impossible to earn more than one merits. Social ministers lower pensions so that they remain secure – the affected persons insist on their earlier selfless services, as if they have to allay the suspicion of greed if they do not want to have to pay for health insurance out of their monthly check on top of everything else. Everybody appeals to the common good – the methodological basic category of morality, which does not at all identify a content, but the technique of producing an appearance of universal validity for a special interest.

The clashes of interests, which are so firmly denied, thrive magnificently under the banner of the common good. Their denial, the constant cooptation of the opposition, is not the giving up of one’s own purpose; and it is the opposite of the effort to get to the bottom of the content of a conflict so that one or another point of contention – because of an insight into the minor importance of a dumb mistake – could also sometime be settled, and then one could concern oneself about the more important conflicts as required by the real position of interests. The moral consideration raises all conflicts to a new level by providing a lot of bases for the continual attempt to beat hostile purposes with their own weapons, namely with an appearance of universal validity which the opposite side, just as morally, wants to give up just as little and likewise applies to its side. That the opposite side claims it wrongfully and thereby all the more disqualifies itself is already clear with the fact that one raises this claim oneself; the accusation of hypocrisy against the other follows the demonstration of one’s own respectability and vice versa. Because this goes back and forth, each one is in the next moment again the referee about this accusation and thus removes oneself from the not so difficult realization that hypocrisy is always and on all sides in play – because it is not at all the opposite of morality, but the demand for morality on the opposite side. Instead, everyone wants to have it somehow believed what is clear to himself about the other – but just because he’s the opponent. So one paragon of virtue shows the penalty card to the other – this increases in any case commitment and bitterness on both sides. It does not increase the success in any case. Because what comes out of a dispute of conflicting purposes in the bourgeois world depends on the means of power of the contending parties and the weight that the real “referee,” the state power, attributes to a social interest according to law and political expediency. In things that matter to them, the state power and the business world do not at all make themselves only dependent on moral legal titles, neither by their own arts of self-representation nor even more those of others. As far as they are able to, the “little people” act no differently in their conflicts with each other. And it is not just in football that the audience has long been used to distinguishing real success from the question as to whether the victory was deserved.

However, a renunciation of this question just does not take place because of this. On the contrary, the practical failure and the experienced ineffectiveness of moral titles for practical interests works as a poke for the continual worry whether, if the desired success is missing, this then really is alright or does not happen unjustly. The failure is indeed not explained, but would somehow be justified if one neglected the proper consideration for the common good, breaching duties. Vice versa, an interest indeed not satisfied, but confirmed over and above each failure, proves not really recognized but worthy of recognition and persists at least “really” as a good claim if the soul-searching reveals the result: all values and methodological rules were met.

Such questions of conscience are by no means decided by a look into the law books. Moral people want to gain their successes in justification mainly in front of their own “within,” before the self-chosen and freely accepted obligatory values. This private aping of civil law even wants to be understood as its true and actual prototype; the whole world of the actual law and of the practice of justice is for its part subject to one’s own imaginary court decisions – the more obstinate, the more stubborn against one’s own interest and sense of justice it proves to be.

Self-evaluation as a victim of nothing but undeserved defeats which arise quite regularly lets very few pursue the career of world-improving politician: far more frequently, it is the beginning of a “criminal career” – and without it hardly anybody becomes a decent outlaw: not a few honorable members of the society gain by stealing some material consolations which their income does not allow them, but to which they are entitled by a higher law, according to their fair self-evaluation. Some commit not always just theoretically but also practically a revenge against the company or an “intimate partner” if they make it impossible for them, according to their conscientious verdict, to reach the object of any longing in permitted ways. The “criminal energy” which is set free feeds from disappointed and insulted feelings of justice, and a materialism that is degenerated to the decision to reimburse itself.

Even here, and more than ever, when one is nabbed, the experience with the law and the hypocrisy of the others strengthens above all most noticeably the art of moral reasoning, the bitterness and the edification.

III. On the compensatory need for morality: about conscience, responsibility and resigned disapproval of the world and oneself

Everybody admits a character flaw which especially he has become accustomed to. Otherwise uncomplicated minds present themselves with this self-incrimination; however, this regularly happens so that there is no mistaking the “but” from the outset. Without fail, it drives at those moral offenses which the person concerned certainly is not guilty of: one has “never asked for a handout” all his born days, on the contrary “worked hard for everything” and in doing so has remained unbowed. Somebody else is up to all possible pranks, but can’t stand dishonesty and is proud of being able to “look anybody in the eye.” The whole working class praises itself – in the form of the union press – even for industriousness full of privation in building the nation; many a grandma never wanted anything at all for herself, but only “always gave.” A clumsy braggart: nobody wants to be this.

Among the masses in a class society, the interest in their own morality seems to be so alive that it separates itself from material interests and even the most false calculation of a benefit and becomes a distinctive matter close to their heart. Honest people conduct themselves – or do so on demand – as if they had to constantly enact the realization of a values program that in the end really has nothing more to do with despicable calculations of advantage. For each activity, they know how to give an honorable principle that they fulfill – or for that matter violate; and that should then be the conception of their activity.

Except for an image of themselves that comes close to the highest personal ideal of human excellence, the activists of honorable life maxims get nothing from it but just that. If one stumbles over a need that destroys this strange use value, the “voice of conscience” speaks up so very sensitively; once they have “come to terms with themselves,” they are content, and serene feelings emerge. Modern citizens do not just occasionally conceive pious thoughts and let them go again – they become moral people.

This of course applies all the more to their diplomatic relations with the rest of the world. The interest in the morality of others also heavily tends to forget the materialism for which the honorary title of the common good should take in all well-meaning people. In place of the claims that thus didn’t get a chance either, steps the “gestus” of a responsibility which stops at nothing. Absolutely everything and everyone is measured by the standards which make sense to them as a higher viewpoint for the setting of purposes – no longer for the sake of the purposes at all, but only for the sake of the standards themselves. No matter what other people do and why: the things they do and don’t do are set in relation to moral values and taken as the program to correspond to or contradict just these values. There needs to be no actual effects on his own well-being that are credited to its author as good or evil intentions: as the will for wickedness or goodness.

This type of judging, which is based on the fiction of universal nagging on principles as a cause and content of human action, becomes so much second nature to modern man that it even gets stamped in his emotional life and puts all the materialistic distinctions between important and unimportant upside down. Parents, for example, are famous for readily being ashamed for their children – the children thus taken responsibility for then get to feel this shame! Intellectuals are often ashamed of their countrymen abroad just as honestly; there a morality is at work that has taken up the abstraction of the nationality in the image of their own respectability. Indignation is however also indicated if an attack is committed by a guerrilla commando on the wrong side, whose purpose one does not know and with whom one most certainly has nothing to do; and this noble feeling is not only required, but indeed felt. The virtue of envy, which finds nothing but undeserved advantages where they do not at all go at one’s own expense, includes even the renunciation of one’s own betterment as an essential condition – it can almost be humiliated through donations. People and interests, to which one grants no noble motives but imagines them driven by wickedness, fall prey to contempt, an ideal lynch justice which in the constitutional state may not always become practical except out of the exhilaration of righteous indignation – thus the interest (having become selfless) in other people’s decency even causes pleasures. One is ready to feel affection and compassion for innocent people, best of all children, who with their big eyes embody the moral principle of innocence. Honest admiration is rarer if somebody is shown around as a recognized monument of altruism – this touches too much the moral self-image, creates a “bad conscience”; however, the value of role models is indisputable for adults who behave as fans of approved purposes and its successful representatives. The self-satisfied comparison of one’s own morality with the ways of a world lacking in virtue is complete when it totally concentrates on pride in not letting itself be fooled any more by hypocrisy, rather in seeing through everything: a disinterested condemnation that quite goes with the willingness to find every new case of immorality interesting. This willingness to do so is called curiosity.

With all practical anti-materialism, moral people end up with one claim on the society, its authorities and its members, one indeed self-produced practical need: they demand recognition – if not of their interests, then all the more of their morality, with which they deny these interests and instead show responsibility. However, because all strive for the compensatory satisfaction of distinguishing themselves in matters of virtue, responsible citizens reproduce in spheres where material things are no longer involved, a performance comparison between people which is not even done by capital. The conflicts of the third kind, which completely normal people open against each other and tenaciously fight, are again won in meanness by being complemented by a hypocrisy of the most unselfish compatibility of interests.

With the competition in questions of moral competence, modern people tend to completely exhaust each other and themselves. Here the fight for self-confidence takes place on which, as is well known, everything else depends, from touchdowns to orgasms and from the professional career to test scores. Where pride in oneself fails to find any positive echo and defeats in the fight of comparisons are added to it, the affected person may ever so much despise the incompetence and unworthiness of his contemporaries who do not appreciate the best among them – doubts about one’s own personality remains. Vice versa, the standards grow with the success which a paragon of virtue by no means wants to fail at; and because the competition never sleeps, sometimes the “fall” first comes, of which it is afterwards said “pride” would have come before. The everyday cheering up of civilized humanity, to be easygoing, relaxed and happy for a change, does fit – including Christmas and Carnival – the moral basic state of mind, slouching through daily life offended by others and discontent with oneself. It sets yet another new standard which is not easy to satisfy. “I can’t laugh light-heartedly!” – already teenagers are capable of and ready for such self-accusations, along with the calculation on a bit of consolation, in a morally fully developed society.

No wonder that for many a member in this circus, the tangible brutalities of the capitalistic world of work, which do not give a damn about the pitfalls of moral self-consciousness, seem almost like a relief from the mental cruelty of private life. The stupidity is only that right here the rejection of the normal human materialism takes place whose compensation fails so fantastically.

IV. On the use value of morality for the leaders of the society and public life, the mood of the country and the business of “criticism”

The delusion that moral images would be an offer of compulsory life programs which would have to be observed for their own the sake is strongly promoted from above in modern democratic class society. The general public and culture have no other subject than the morality of all participants and their deeds: and they allow from the outset no other interest than that in extremely clean conditions.

In this ministration to the sentiments of the nation, the small minorities of class society whose members do not at all need morality as a false emergency program for coping with the inevitable failure of their freedom are quite included in leading positions. Exactly the people whose materialism is served very well by the “objective compulsions” of political power and the free market competition are called on to take a reserved position towards their successful interests and to avow universal higher purposes which they in truth would serve with their machinations. The private wishes of the people with the right means and the virtually objective laws according to which these yield their benefits are distinguished clearly enough in capitalism that space remains for a plausible interpretation of the higher handiwork as a service quite full of self-denial which in the end “permits no private life.”

Such avowals and the corresponding self-stylization have in the higher spheres of society something quite luxurious about them. They are not the expression of embarrassing efforts to undo or sugarcoat everyday defeats by complaining to a fictitious higher authority. The hypocrisy and the intended interests are indeed no less obvious. However, where the real means for material success are no problem, where it is not necessary in principle for people to have moral posturing as a hopeful and hopeless substitute means for their advancement, the cheap suspicion that it would be a hypocrisy and would only be employed out of calculation does not hold much water. There one is so free to start with the self-defined “problems” of self-consciousness – and that have more to do with self-indulgence than with failed compensation. They are presentable, interesting and in the newspapers for the common people worth their own society column. There is nothing more edifying than “failure” in freely chosen tasks, before luxurious standards and without poverty, and nothing is as exemplary. For them, even suicide is called “taking their own life.”

In their relations with the class-wise orderly and regulation-needing world, the interests, for whose success moral legal titles should not even be of imaginary compensatory importance, step without ado under the same title under which everyone displays interest in the morality of the world in his own way, only much more aggressively and much more credibly: as responsibility. Without restrictions and conditions, the asserted ruling interest falls within the duty of looking after everything – and the actual dependence of the rest of the people on the ruling purposes “proves” that this responsibility would here be more than a gestus full of hubris. The brutality that some people really have to decide over the livelihoods of lots of employees, over the poverty of entire areas, over the contributions and official duties of their people, over the creditworthiness of whole nations, even over war and peace, is readily counted as a moral burden that the “little man” is lucky to be spared – theoretically, he may take part in it all the more.

On the basis of this lie, all public voices in democracy work harmoniously together on the never-ending definition of the “common good,” the rights and duties which would arise from it for the movers and shakers and other people, as well as the moral standards that the ones like the others would have to meet quite personally. That nothing at all practically depends on this discussion just makes for its inexhaustible charm. Freedom rules in constructing values whose realization should raise the “problems” which are then said to be the society’s, the state’s, the parties’ and generally everybody’s real ones. One crisis after the other is attested to a nation whose capital triumphantly steps up to conquer the world market and whose political power ensures just as triumphantly the necessary security, because the return flow of capital or legitimization would come off badly. Others bring up the slogan “optimism” and confront a people, which they are just using for some remarkable progress in the preparation for war, with congratulations on the good mood that they don’t let themselves spoil.

Meanwhile, the church subsumes all world events under its diagnosis of disregard for unborn life. A peace movement contributes insights about the inner peacelessness of modern man which has affected all social institutions, even the national defense system. And over it all is enthroned a President who talks at length about the methodological principle of the whole debate: the lie of the responsibility of everyone for everything, summarized in the classic linguistic monument to the most brutal distinctionlessness and national distinction, the “we” that no faction in the society has been able to discover friction in; the campaign for patriotic morality suiting all tastes.

Under such auspices, public opinion busies itself with a lot of competing value-conscious blueprints for the world that do not want to be obliged to any special material interest, but arise rather from the free desire of different social factions and authorities to display responsibility and an ennobling influence on people and circumstances. The interest in the morality of all, self-expression as a universal conscience and competition for respect for it, is simply not just a private pastime, but the delight of the public – and there an important instrument of democracy: each citizen full of skepticism and life experience is allowed to judge which competitor for the functions of rule whose presented hypocrisies he most wants to believe. The competing “opinion makers” themselves provide the standards under which serious contributions are to be distinguishable from the unscrupulous. The former are characterized by a principle that has nothing at all to do with its content: they reveal that they are not honest quirks – the likes of that fall quickly to ridicule – but calculated on propaganda effects. Even the churches pick out dogmas with which they want to make an effect – they have plenty of them; otherwise they would be sects that they can’t despise enough.

Without this art of the propagandistic calculation, one would barely succeed in fostering and satisfying the morality of the people as comprehensively as a democratic public does. On the one hand, a government brings up its policy of “reforms” as a humanitarian system of entitlements and wants to “break old habits”; at the same time, it would like to have virtues such as “engagement” and “public spirit” distinguished in its democratic canon and even therefore sometimes recommends sympathy for demonstrators. Another government condemns such a thing as “pressure from the street,” demands respect for every bigotry, happily praises self-sacrifice, condemns any “entitlements mentality” – and can thus provide a suitable echo to a policy which, for example, handles a poverty increasingly over the semi-official charity system. How would a man morally muddling along come up on his own with the idea that economic booms and busts are inevitable? With the recommendation of respectable attitudes towards immigrants, unemployed persons, Chinese businessmen and oil sheiks, etc., the manufacturers of images of enemies and friends may not fall for their own moral artifacts. If they are not calculating “to move with the times,” they might embarrass the next practical redefinition of what has to be the “national interest” until further notice.

The other task of public hypocrisy, which requires cleverness, exists in the handling of criticism. This means both: criticism must be applied in the right spirit, and be finished at the right time. The first department is done with a little moral rigor. Any principle held on to with some stubbornness and well-measured unworldliness is always good for ridicule – and criticism is nothing else and must not be anything else in a free public. Whoever is angry at a piece of policy, an effect of the free market business life, etc., is immediately taught that, while he has a point, strictly speaking he does not have an injury from it, but a value which he has to unselfishly serve with his objections; thus discontent is channeled into the constructive art of complaint, into the commitment to make it better; and whoever fails to do this forfeits the right to rant anyhow. Conversely, and this is the rule in mature societies – the annoyances are constructed by the partisan opinion-makers in this very constructive sense, that should inspire nothing but the competition of opinions and moral party lines; whoever wants to may as a private individual use that as an offer to place his private misery into a public scandal and rediscover a bribery of public officials in his highly personal reduction of student financial assistance, or the immigrant “problem” in his need for an affordable apartment. In the end, the criticized figures have “lost some of their credibility” – this methodological category, which wants to have judged more the skill in dealing with moral claims than their naive observance, expresses very nicely the calculating character of moralism itself, with which a “constructively critical” public goes to work.

Subsequently, the public disgrace of important offices and persons is once again restored, and indeed with a differentiation, whose proper use also wants to be learned and looked after: higher figures also have to follow a higher morality. People who use morality to varnish a quite thorough failure let it become quite clear to themselves that success requires a few actually prohibited recklessnesses; and when it comes to the success of morally good things, perhaps the “common good” itself, then any mess is okay. The platitude that politics is “a dirty business” wants by no means to discredit this sphere, but grants its organizers a morally exceptional situation. The constant complainer still has to be invented who does not get afflicted by reverence, at the latest vis a vis his authority, the trustee of the “dirty business.” Educated moralists can condemn the same embarrassment, as required, as a “double standard” or admire it as a “tragedy”; and from the long history of morality, they have distilled the fine distinction between “ethics of conviction,” a kind of mental exercise for observers and preachers without responsibility, and “ethics of responsibility,” the guideline for the movers and shakers which permits everything.

The one who gets stuck too long in the “exposure” of public hypocrisy – and even more, who criticizes rather than appearing disappointed and entertaining the audience with scandals – falls under “fouling one’s own nest” or, the same in a refined manner, the “cynic.” Because after all one must again accept the hypocrisy, even if it is so unbelievable; the constructive side of morality requires that: the duty to the fiction of a commonality with the disgraced opponent. This duty is called tolerance; and to have violated it is the hardest accusation that a thoroughly moralized free society has – which is why good people immediately rebut it by proving how their “cynicism” has after all only been feigned and how well it had been intended. The accusation of “intolerance” excludes the people concerned from the commonality of democrats, who in the back and forth of moral hypocrisies subordinate their power of judgment to the imperative of compatibility. Rarely or at least never as clearly as with this reproach, democrats announce their willingness to destroy the identified “enemy of freedom.”