How Much Blame Does a Person Deserve for Believing the Lies?

A debate on X about feminism, the Pill, and medical treachery got me thinking about personal culpability.

The context: a poster named ChristyForChange facetiously noted that it’s surely “just a coincidence that Birth Control pills were given out like candy to Millennial teens and now IVF is over a 30 billion dollar market.” It was a straightforward and unobjectionable point about commercial opportunism—create a problem, sell a solution, get rich—and didn’t provoke much pushback.

Then Prolife_Sam went a step further, and dispute followed:

A sample of the replies and comments:

• “If women can’t be held accountable for their own choices, then why are they given the right to vote?” – FlyrockMK18
• “Breaking News: Modern woman discovers she cannot eat her cake and have it – blames those who told her to ignore everyone who tried to tell her she cannot eat her cake and have it.” – Ashibuoguh
• “Just remember IT’S NEVER YOUR FAULT EVER!” – Req_Thought
• “Love the comments. These asshole men who seem to hate women are acting like some of us took BC b/c we hate children & not for other reasons. We also trusted our drs, the ones we were supposed to be able to trust.” – SarahTheBanned
• “The comments here are appalling. People… you do realize we were told at our first OB visits as teenagers that getting on the pill was the right thing to do even if you weren’t sexually active. That it helped with hormones and breakouts and cramps. We were lied to. Blatantly.” – BlueberriSherri

The Headwinds

This exchange hints at multiple stiff headwinds bearing down on us simultaneously—a culture of propaganda, combined with corporate predation, combined with feminism, combined with growing rancor between the sexes—and turning up the difficulty of every step forward. We’re dealing with poisoned minds, poisoned bodies, compromised social orders, thwarted human beings. But all of that is an essay for a later date.

Like I noted, what most interests me is the question of blameworthiness for those fooled by lies.

The women argue for clemency toward the naive teenager who had the Pill urged on her by medical authorities (even if she was a chaste girl in the youth group at her church rather than a promiscuous cheerleader). The authorities told her the Pill would help with other issues like acne breakouts and cramps and “regulating her cycles.” So she took it and was hormonally and spiritually devastated by it—and it wasn’t exactly her fault.

Men meanwhile are in no state for sympathy. The last few decades have made sympathy all but impossible, as feminism has taken far more from them than it has taken from young ladies—career prospects, marriage prospects, the families some of them might have had. Women have been coddled, flattered, pandered to, absolved of blame, and as a result there’s no sympathy left to give.

And both sides have compelling arguments.

On the one hand, it’s an injustice of unthinkable magnitude when young people are misled by doctors, teachers, pastors, and parents, not to mention shows, movies, songs, ads, and the larger popular culture. Impressionable minds are incredibly vulnerable, and the youth are owed better. My own case obviously takes a different shape than birth control pills and feminism, but I still experience surges of rage when remembering the bad teachings of my formative years and their consequences.1 To borrow the classic Boromir meme, one does not simply remain unaffected by bad teachings, just as a sapling does not grow properly after getting mangled by some barbarian with shears. Grave consequences follow.

On the other hand, living with imperfect knowledge is basically the human condition. You can trace it to the beginning: Eve was given bad information by the serpent in the Garden, and now all her children live in a fallen state as a result. Unless our life is just a hopeless story in which agency is nothing and circumstance is everything, we are still somehow responsible for what we do, in spite of our imperfect knowledge.

There’s also a deeper and more troubling criticism in the men’s rebuke: on some level, a person who falls for lies probably wants them to be true (just as Eve likely wanted the serpent’s claim to be true).

Rectitude of Volition

For the nightmares they have unleashed upon our times, the feminists and their enablers will eventually have to answer, if not in this world then in the next. But the question has to be asked of the young ladies who fell under the witches’ sway (as well as of the fellow-traveller males who wear t-shirts saying “The Future is Female”): why did you go for the diminishment of men, the careerism, the rejection of tradition, the promiscuity?2 Did you not, to some degree, participate in and sign off on the feminist vision, wanting to be a high-status girlboss more than a wife and mother? Again, there’s less culpability for those who accepted the lies than for those who told the lies. But still there’s some.

The women are the ones implicated in this case, but that doesn’t mean men aren’t implicated in others. The larger theme applies to us all—and the upshot is that we all must constantly check our desires and purify our will.

As Josef Pieper notes in The Four Cardinal Virtues, our decisions are not a purely intellectual matter of assessing pros against cons—but are influenced by the will also. Not even Ben Shapiro himself is driven entirely by “facts and logic.” What’s required in addition to cognitive capability is, in Pieper’s words, “a rectitude of the whole human being which purifies the most hidden roots of volition.” When it comes to prudential decision-making, this purity of heart can easily level the cognitive gap between a simple farmer and a university professor with a 140 IQ, if the one is virtuous and the other compromised.

In order to make good decisions, we need to want the right things. In order to want the right things, we have to fully commit ourselves to truth and avoid the choices, attachments, and vices that compromise our commitment to truth. Wayward desires have wayward ends.

It’s a sobering thought, and also an invigorating one. Every single decision a man makes—even a seemingly trivial one—has real implications. Grand challenges test not only our worthiness at that very instant, but also the habits we have been developing for some time and the person we have been becoming, since every decision of the past informs who we are today. And thus the things we do today will determine whether we pass the test tomorrow.

The bad news is that 99% of Westerners have been schooled by massive propaganda machines unlike anything the world has ever seen before, a machine which turns lies, mistruths, false pieties, fakeness into conventions and big money industries. It is very bad indeed. The good news is that purity of heart—which is closely tied to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, and which we are always either developing or failing to develop—can go a long way toward protecting us against the colossal propaganda machine. Lies don’t sway the pure-hearted nearly so easily.

But the good news has an element that some people won’t like: it means we are, in some way, responsible for the things we believe, even if we were lied to.

https://thechivalryguild.substack.com/p/how-much-blame-does-a-person-deserve