Movie/Record Industry Finds Old-Fashioned Morality

After decades of efforts to undermine traditional morality, the movie and record industries have made an about face and are now engaged in a campaign to restore traditional morality, at least in one narrow area. They wish to emphasize that stealing is wrong, especially as it concerns their digital works!

Does anyone else see the irony here? Many of these institutions have done everything they can to undermine public morals and insult those who hold to them, and the Christian Worldview from which they sprung. They have coarsened the landscape with ever increasing amounts of vulgarity, profanity, promiscuity, perversion, violence, and rebellion- all glorified in Dolby Stereo and Living Color. Those who held to old fashioned morality were impugned, ridiculed, insulted, mocked, and even made into mentally-ill heavies in songs and movies that bombarded the nation's psyche for generations.

These are the barbarians who threw out absolute truth and beauty. Without those things, there is nothing to decide what is really "art" and what isn't. So they quit trying to make art say something about beauty and truth and resorted to making stuff whose only value was "shock value". And who and what where they trying to shock? Why, middle America, with their antiquidated Christian-affected morality.

So Hollyweird and the Acid Rock/Gangsta Rap freaks got what they wanted. The younger generation rejected absolutes and embraced nihilism. The fools in the entertainment industry failed to see that their attacks on traditional morality were sawing off the branch on which they sat. With morals out the door, with it being all about "me and my feelings", then why shouldn't a young person make illegal copies of songs or movies they liked? Why shouldn't they give them to their friends? If right and wrong are just illusions imposed on us by mentally-ill religious nuts who probably have cut-up bodies in their freezer at home, then why is stealing wrong?

The socialists in Hollyweird taught socialism, and now the poorer teenager sees no reason to refrain from taking the property of the richer record company. Why wait for the government to do it? After all, they have taught the philosophy of socialism combined with cynicism toward governmental (and parental) authority. It is only natural that their pupils will adopt the loose view of socialists toward the private property rights of others without waiting for the government to serve as an intermediate in the theft. If there are no absolutes, then "legitimacy" has no meaning, thus there is no need to wait for government to "legitimize" unauthorized use of another person's property.

All this is not to say that I think it is OK to pirate songs and movies. The industry is right that this is stealing. It is the only moral issue they have been right on in the last forty years. One can only hope that they begin to connect the dots to other areas of life in which they have promoted immorality for their own profit even though it brings great destruction on the fabric of society for the rest of us.

I hope they will catch on, but I am not confident they will. Regardless, campaigns such as the one I show an image of above will not work absent the moral frame-work of the very people they have been undermining, slandering, mocking, and heaping abuse on for the last four decades. If they manage to convince the next generation to quit "stealing" their digital material, it will only be because middle American morality (the product of that old-tyme religion) saves them.