the utility of morality
good guys & bad guys, winners & losers, the taller tale
One of the most dysregulating parts of Trump’s electoral victory, it seems, has been its betrayal of polite society’s prized core tenet: that the good guy always wins. I understand some of the reflex reactions—especially condemning the American populous for electing a liar/misogynist/racist/rapist/convicted felon over a woman. Its an effort to make sense of how frenetic the moral compass of the country is.
Doing right, condemning wrong, good claiming victory over evil, transcendent spiritual reward for living a decent life, heroes thwarting villains—these societal principles of morality inform how we navigate life.
It is perhaps the Blackness of my existence that can’t invest faith in such moral binaries; founded on a bedrock of Judeo-Christian religious doctrine and ritualistically bastardised by political finagling, financial interference and white supremacist logic.
The importance of morality is a sequence of societal façades. A game of bluffs in a civilisation built and sustained by too many atrocities to count.
Morality, it seems, is more a fluid exoskeleton than a rigid, foundational structure.
Wrapping my head around this began from within.
I’ve felt plagued by the pressure to be a good person. Always hyper-vigilant of how my actions will have an implication on others, always trying my best to never step on anyone’s toes, always devastatingly immobilised when I fall short. This vigorous self-surveillance has had many adverse effects. Getting to the crux of how I feel is cluttered by a process of taking everyone else’s feelings into account. I’m hieroglyphic to myself. Psychically putting others, even hypothetically, before myself in this way has involved a shrinkage of self that people close to me have registered as dishonest. They’re right! The honest me felt buried under mounds of expectation. I decided to do away with morality for a while. Uncouple from what is right or healthy and be concerned only with excavating truth. It’s been scary and messy. I’ve said shit to people’s faces that I probably shouldn’t have. I’ve sent texts that probably should have stayed drafts. I’ve let the mask drop all the way off and I’m sometimes unhappy with what i’ve seen. But I’m learning what that feels like, the me who exists beneath the performance of pleasantries. He’s a little curt but he’s not so bad. most importantly, I realised I have my own moral compass—separate from societal expectations—that needs further calibrated. i’m working on it.
Back in May, I met a singer at a film screening event and we exchanged socials. Dedicatedly vocal about their support of Palestine, they shared a post about Drake vs. Kendrick, rightfully pointing out how many people were energised about a conflict between entertainers but not about actual conflicts resonating through the global south.
Even in entertainment, there’s lessons about the nature of (supplanting) power, I said.
Admittedly, my response was partially spurred by feeling a little called out. But with Kendrick Lamar’s releases of GNX and Trump’s presidential win, I’ve noticed some interesting nexuses between the Gemini’s and the cultural reaction to their victories.
At the risk of sounding sociopathic: if we understand morality to be a fluid exoskeleton rather than a rigid structure of belief then it is probably helpful to think of morality as a political tool rather than an enforced rule. In this respect, I’ve been approaching morality not as a governable framework but in terms of its utility.
You might be wondering why. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll focus on one atrocity. We live in a world where Israel is committing genocide in broad daylight. Genocide is objectively and uncomplicatedly wrong. Its painfully simple how wrong genocide is. Palestinian death persists regardless. Morality is not the most governable factor in the arithmetic of this political equation. This rendering of reality is why I believe it’d do us—those who oppose genocide and other social atrocities—well to not get hung up on securing the moral high-ground but strategise how to utilise morality in order to achieve logistical success.
Kendrick.
Kendrick’s cultural victory is a masterclass in wielding the utility of morality.
Kendrick calls Drake out for fraternising with sex offenders on Not Like Us but brings out Dr. Dre1 at the Pop Out concert and works with Kodak Black2 extensively on Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers. He is not above associating with men who’ve abused women in the past. His feud with Drake, however, was never about who was the better person or role model. Being good is a label that Kendrick has always adamantly resisted.
On Section.80s, near the advent of his career, he states on Ab Soul’s Outro:
I'm not the next pop star, I'm not the next socially-aware rapper
I am a human motherfuckin' being over dope-ass instrumentation
On 2022’s Mr Morale and the Big Steppers, he emphatically says on Savior:
Kendrick made you think about it, but he is not your savior.
Being a more moral man than Drake wasn’t what was necessary to garner success for Kendrick. It’s a rap feud. So he was always gonna say some heinous shit. being known as a pretty decent guy would’ve been a hindrance. he needed to be the boogeyman but he also needed to not be so heinous that the audience registered him as a bully.
So what did he do? Kendrick manufactured a story.
He cast himself as the protagonist: The truth-telling underdog valiantly defending the soul of rap from one of its spiritual motherlands: his hometown of Compton.
He cast Drake as the antagonist: The lying, manipulating, shapeshifter who’s leeching from musical wellsprings that aren’t rightfully his.
This was all mapped out within the first 60 seconds of euphoria.
Everything Kendrick did from there was in service of this David-and-Goliath plot.
Throughout the beef, Kendrick accuses Drake of misogyny (veering dangerously close to homophobia, tbh), of not being a good father and most notably, being a paedophile. these are moral arguments, of course, but they serve more like cinematography to more deeply contextualise Kendrick’s main storyline: one warrior’s mission to reclaim a genre that’s lost its way. This is why 6:16 in LA and Watch the Party Die are so significant—they’re artistic breather episodes to cleanse the palette of the violence and put into perspective Kendrick’s more noble aspirations.
Part of what made this whole gambit so hilarious and masterful is that Kendrick accuses Drake of being “a master manipulator” whilst pulling some of the most intricate manipulation that the genre of rap has ever seen. The morality of manipulation, it seems, isn’t the prime issue—the level of execution is.
When I speak of the utility of morality, perhaps it is most easily communicable to talk about the fabrication of story. Stories are how we make sense of a chaotic world, they are the most straightforward way to isolate good from bad. We are simple beings, highly intelligent but still beholden to palaeolithic hardware—if someone makes us feel good, then they are good. If someone makes us feel bad, then they’re bad.
Kendrick didn’t succeed because he’s a better person or even a better rapper. Kendrick won because he’s a better storyteller, who used the fault lines of recognisable truths about Drake to piece together a compelling collection of devastating, lyrical auto-fiction. When this was unfolding in real time, the biggest takeaway became lucidly clear: “Drake doesn't even comprehend the battle that he's fighting”
Trump.
…I’m sure you’ve seen your fair share of think-pieces about why Harris lost to Trump. Lots of blame on the traditional —isms and while I’m inclined to agree that they’re integral components of Trump’s success, I genuinely think that the crux of the matter is much simpler:
Donald Trump is the better story.
Elections are bizarre, nationwide popularity contests, rife with pomp and pageantry, meant to excite people into participating in the political process twice a decade. The democrats tried to manufacture enthusiasm through corporatised lip service and defunct bureaucratic machinery. They thought running a campaign of benign fear masquerading as political competence would be enough to defeat Trump.
But the truth is, Harris offered very little beyond the prospect of being the first of her gender and race (at a time when the country is effervescing with intolerance towards “DEI initiatives”). Professionally, she’s experienced and qualified, and perhaps if these were the orderly republicans of yesteryear, that might’ve been enough. But narratively, she offered little challenge to Trump’s winning narrative and only ever mustered trace amounts of magnetism from her personality to counteract his brash charisma.
She chose to appeal to the sensibilities of her opponents over establishing an authentic relationship with her own base. She didn’t communicate policies that were bold or generally legible to the average, undecided citizen. She didn’t even position herself as the more moral option by promising to rescind funding from an ongoing genocide. The entire strategy was Trump is bad and when you’re running for president in a country as fucked up as America… Leaning into negative visualisation is a terribly lethargic strategy for winning people over.
Like Drake, the democrats did not comprehend the battle they were fighting (again).
When Trump announced his presidency in 2015, he was energising out the gate. The media loved to hate him but couldn’t look away. Immediately, his claim that Mexicans “are not sending their best” cut into the heart of the American zeitgeist, succinctly establishing a common enemy whilst diverting attention from any definitive, domestic policies for improving the state of America, as if building a wall would magically fix the country’s dizzying wealth disparity. Regardless—disgruntled white people felt seen and heard.
Trump is a showman running on pure instinct, the simplicity of the shit he says opens up many-forking paths of narrative opportunities. When you put aside how terrible of a person he is, it is bizarrely profound to watch.
Just like Kendrick on euphoria, Trump manufactured a story in a way that the audience white Americans got on board with and Trumpers have been eating out the palm of his hand ever since. Appealing to their sense of duty towards their fellow citizens or their ethical obligations doesn’t work because they do not think they’re wrong. Calling Trump supporters racists and misogynists for nearly a decade hasn’t demotivated them or nudged them closer to denouncing him; it has simply strengthened their resolve. The reaganesque Make America Great Again brand has mobilised Trump’s supporters beneath a blood-red banner of hodge-podge ideology and the Democrats, who have no discernible principles of their own, lack a conceivable strategy to counter it (or perhaps they just don’t care).
When Trump was shot, two thoughts went through my head.
I wonder if he’s alive.
If he lives, he wins.
An assassination attempt against the one-time, outsider president who is attempting a phoenix-rise from the political ashes is too juicy a story. Surviving an All-American bullet makes him positively Herculean. As soon as footage surfaced of him days later, strutting out at a rally to 50 Cent’s Many Men, I said to myself, That’s a wrap. Harris is done. This is absolute cinema.
Trump operates with his own set of moral logics, his fascinating lack of inhibition is perhaps what allows him to lie with such ease and dizzying momentum, speaking with such straightforward vulgarity. None of it is off-putting to his supporters, who have bought into every word of the story he’s woven.
In a welcomed exchange with Kevin of hot old planet, he asked: should we start endorsing and amplifying the voices of openly vulgar leftists?
I posited that the question misunderstands what Trump has been able to achieve and access. He has found an organic way to energise people, structured a story around that feeling, bottled it, and made it the narrative ecosystem that politically sustains him. Vulgarity is simply the cinematography that frames the story.
This is not something the American left has to struggle so hard with.
Bernie Sanders was a great example of someone who understood how to utilise morality with remarkable effect. Every single problem Sanders was ever asked about—farming, Cuba, the national state of steelwork—he would find a way to re-direct that shit back to his core premise: billionaires are taking the piss and everyone deserves free healthcare and education. He hammered that shit and it slapped every time. Because he’s right. But he made you feel how right he was and not only was he right, every move he made was in line with his wider narrative. He refused to be bought by corporate super PAC’s and largely ran on modest donations of public support. Sanders made himself the knight squaring up against the mega-corporate dragons that have been burning through the life-force of America for decades, stuck to the quest and told you to grab a sword and fight with him.
I’m probably not breaking any revolutionary, ideological ground by considering the utility of morality in the way I have, just recognising a pretty basic truth—that morality is a fluid constituent of controlling the narrative.
In public debate—you don’t necessarily win by being the better person. You don’t even win by having the best argument. There’s body language, pre-empting and controlling the sequence of events, ability to apply pressure in a relevant way, overpowering with intellect or perhaps verbosity and, above all, not expressing too much emotion (this clip of Ben Shapiro getting cooked by a trans dude is my favourite exhibition of all these skills for the greater good).
Being right is great but the ground isn’t level. Its more useful to know how to win the audience in the theatre of debate, to understand what tools are effective or which specialist needs to be dispatched to assure victory. The left has prioritised occupying the moral high-ground over winning the room.
The right intimately understands the importance of winning the room, appealling to emotion and controlling the narrative—which is why they focus so much capital on securing media empires that rarely paywall their websites where they can oscillate freely between pretending to care about facts and statistics and reeling off unsubstantiated claims.
In the similar way Kendrick accused Drake of being a master manipulator while he masterfully manipulated the conditions and the narrative in his favour, Trump’s declaration of “fake news” was a concise diversion tactic of a Republican whose base historically spreads misinformation like wildfire. Conservatives understand their landscape and how essential fiction is in shaping it. They understand the story doesn’t need to be Shakespeare, in fact, when accounting for the general level of American literacy—it’s probably better if its not. They understand the shit just needs to pop and get ‘em riled up and they’ve been whipping white folks (and other conservative alignments) into a frenzy in the comfort of their own homes across America for 30 years straight.
Conservatives are also eerily fine with falling in line. Their infighting mostly reads like pantomime. They don’t internally thwart candidates that have managed to energise masses, they determine the profitability of popularity and get onboard. this is something both UK labour and the US democrats refused to do when met with Corbyn and Sanders; candidates whose narratives were compelling enough to draw massive amounts of organic popularity. The institutional left did everything in its bureaucratic power to hinder them—likely because the victory of these candidates would’ve been a threat to their cushy way of life. But you can’t manufacture that type of hype with BRAT Summer marketing or shallow storytelling, you just have to seize it and nurture it when it naturally arrives and I’m sorry but Harris just ain’t have the sauce. The profound lack of compelling, narrative counteraction from the left side of the political spectrum is why the alt-right is rising globally. There is no meaningful, cohesive challenge. It is not as easy as pedestaling a “Left Joe Rogan” but it is as simple as needing charismatic, principled candidates who can wield the moral fibre of stories in their favour, cutting through the froth that Trump has whipped up and say, your problem ain’t with immigrants/trans people/(insert marginalised demographic here)—its with greedy rich people, corporations hustling you, and the politicians that grease their palms; let’s fight them together.
When we’re young, the arithmetic of morality is so simple. Good and bad are demarcated strictly. Then the complexity of life pours in. Jadedness and fear get larger. Hope and optimism become harder to access. This is where terms like better the devil you know take root. They’re tacit admissions that the world is run by the bad guys. Our moral arithmetic gets complicated but our emotional responses remain just as strict as children’s. One mistake can fell a good person from grace. One good deed can change a bad person’s lighting. We don’t like being betrayed by someone we like. We anticipate betrayal by someone untrustworthy. Detaching from morality enough to see it as a part of a larger picture is uncomfortable, because want to believe that we’re in a just world so bad. We aren’t. But we are all architects of our own moral universes.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Trump’s victory isn’t about the exertion of story at all. Perhaps the democrat’s only fault was that they didn’t simply run another folksy white man who seemed moderately dependable. But as long as we’re all influenced by a good story, we’re at the mercy of other people’s narratives.
If we’re ever to break free from the fairytales of others, we need to get good at penning our own.
I’ve noticed when people bring up the abusive men that Kendrick has collaborated with, it’s deployed as a gotcha moment to discredit him, trapping everyone in the amber of the event. For that reason, I think it’s pertinent to mention actual details. In the case of assaulting Dee Barnes in 1991, Dre pled no contest to charges of assault and battery at the time, was fined $2,500 and sentenced to two years probation and community service. He also publicly apologised for his past abusive behaviour towards the women he’s harmed in 2015, admitting that alcohol addiction and struggling to acclimatise to fame as a source of much of his violence. He wasn’t specific to anyone in his apology. This, of course, doesn’t undo the trauma he’s inflicted, including situations that, I assume, he hasn’t been tried for. It’s something that Dee Barnes and others still have to live with the repercussions of.
The specifics of Kodak’s case(s) are muddled. He was originally charged with sexual assault, but accepted a deal and pleaded guilty to first-degree assault. As part of the plea deal, he had to apologise to the victim of the case, who watched online. The assault happened in 2016, the victim said the rapper attacked her at a hotel room after the show, biting her on the neck and breast and “continuing even after she told him to stop”. His aggression towards her is something he admitted to and apologised for but again, there was harm inflicted and the victim must live with the repercussions of that.
The retention of humanity despite making mistakes and the process of redemption is a big part of Kendrick’s work. I can see how working with Dre and Kodak fits into that, rather than betrays it. I bring up both of these contexts not to excuse their behaviours but to show Kodak and Dre are examples, at the very least, of repentant and legally reprimanded men. The accountability they strive for in their own lives and in service of the lives of those they’ve harmed is a wholly different matter.
There are people who’ve gone further than this and said this is the root of why stories exist in the first place— that as a species we think in stories because it means we can see ourselves as the good guys and the people whose food we are stealing as the bad guys. And I think those people are correct, so I am depressed.
I think that in the end, we are capable of real nobility and good, as long as we believe someone is one of the good guys. The idea that humans are purely good or purely bad is a misunderstanding: we are good to those we believe deserve it, and bad to those who we believe do not. Most atrocities are in the end stories of love, because in the end people commit them in the belief we are protecting the things we love.
I think the most grim thing I believe about humanity is that “love always wins” is a warning. I don’t think we want love to win, when it brings its vengeance upon us. It would be nice to believe our enemies act from hate. More than nice, maybe; it would be necessary. But I expect in the end that all of us act out of love
I've started the journey to find the "me who exists beneath the performance of pleasantries" about 5 years ago, and boy, it really derailed my life. But in the best way. I'm now, happily, the best me I have ever been because I am as true to myself as ever. Great essay.