> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://mereorthodoxy.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Aldous Huxley’s Delicious Moral Treats Emporium - URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/aldous-huxleys-delicious-moral-treats-emporium/ - Published: 2026-10-14T11:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-14T10:59:59.000Z - Description: If people keep stoking the fires of moral outrage, we are likely to see more murders like Brian Thompson’s before the close of the decade. - Author: Mere Orthodoxy - Tags: Culture, Formation, Matthew Loftus Recent calls for the public execution of the “Cornell 7” accused of raping a fellow student brings to mind one of Aldous Huxley’s [most famous quotes](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/07/01/clear-maltreat/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com): > *The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. Men must be bribed to build up and do good by the offer of an opportunity to hurt and pull down. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.* Huxley’s description is self-evidently true, especially in the age of social media. It has never been easier to go on a crusade and treat yourself to some righteous indignation. One man was mistaken for one of the Cornell 7 and his family recently a barrage of [death threats](https://nypost.com/2026/10/01/us-news/cornell-7-lawsuit-mistakenly-served-to-innocent-marine-with-same-name/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com); the plaintiff herself has already been [swatted](https://edition.cnn.com/2026/10/08/us/cornell-jane-doe-threats-swatting?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Anyone who has been accused, mistakenly or not, of a grave enough offense will find that many people are less concerned for justice than for taking an opportunity to vomit out a vile stream of curses. It certainly seems to taste sweet enough on the way out of their mouths. ## **A Longing For Justice?** Social media rewards spite and rage. It is very easy to add one’s voice to the mob; it is hard to pause and consider whether or not a particular incident or person is being represented fairly. Whether it is cheering on the death of a health insurance executive or celebrating as immigrants are chained up simply because their legal status has expired, the Moral Treats Emporium operates 24 hours a day on the internet. While we can be grateful that online messages are the worst that most people can muster, the harassment inflicted on innocent people (and the guilty) is bad enough in itself before we get to the cases of people being unjustly fired. Good causes are gutted from the inside by people who want to use them for their own self-righteous preening, while public discourse about moral issues is derailed by grandstanding. The culture of victimhood is symbiotic with the desire to be cruel; the more traumatized your group is by another, the more justified you are in punishing them. Diabetics develop “insulin resistance” over time, which makes metabolizing excess sugar harder and harder; a similar process is at work in our moral polity. If people keep stoking the fires of moral outrage, we are likely to see more murders like Brian Thompson’s before the close of the decade. The 2016 game *Wolfenstein: The New Order* is like many other first-person shooter games in that it finds a way to make killing human beings on the screen feel more righteous. In the extended video prologue before the game's first main level, the protagonist watches helplessly as Nazis murder a care home full of people with mental disabilities before kidnapping their nurse for some nefarious purpose. The fantasy of revenge is part of what makes *Wolfenstein* oddly compelling. One could say that Huxley’s observation is just the human desire for justice corrupted. We are all familiar enough with stories of cold-blooded murder, innocents raped, and populations subject to genocide; we all feel hunger for a sinner to get what's coming to them. In this telling, hate, anger, and bloodlust are misdirected impulses. Sufficient policing and orderly justice meted out will satisfy us. There is some theological depth to this. Hebrews 9:22 says that “almost all things are cleansed with blood, according to the Law, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” Every sinful action has some punishment assigned to it, a perfect cosmic circle of justice. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have a personal judge meting out the punishment, while dharmic religions prefer to let people get what’s coming to them in a less personal way. Paganism makes the whole shebang more uncomfortable with capricious deities rather than just ones. Christian doctrine has taught for centuries that God did not create evil, so evil is always a privation of the good. It is true that our impulse towards cruelty is *sometimes* just a misdirected zeal for justice. This is insufficient, though, and not simply because our human systems of justice are never perfect enough. Unfortunately for all of us, the problem goes deeper. ## For the Love of Cruelty If the human penchant for cruelty is not simply a desire to see justice done, what is it? What is the sugar in Huxley’s treats? We might argue that it’s power—not in a Foucaultian everything-is-really-about-power sense, but more that human beings love the feeling of power and inflicting pain on another person is the fastest shortcut to feeling powerful. Just as drawing a mustache on the *Mona Lisa* might give someone a rise, so desecrating another person created in the image of God is its own rush. This is not quite it, but it gets us a little closer to the most unpleasant reality: a lot of people really do enjoy cruelty when they have a free run of it. Slasher movies (and plenty of other video games) draw people in with the opportunity to watch innocent people suffer. Sadism of all sorts is a popular theme in pornography and videos of actual murders or war deaths still get traded around the disquietingly crowded gutters of the internet. It’s hard to find a war where the conquering armies didn’t enjoy torturing civilians at one point or another. The seminal slasher, *Halloween*, shows its first murder through the eyes of the killer, letting the audience experience the grotesque joy of taking another human life. Not everyone is like this, of course, but it only takes a small handful of internet trolls sending death threats to make the sister of a mistakenly identified rapist shudder at a sound outside her window. The circle of people who could have their desire to maltreat someone awakened with the scent of cookies in the oven is wider than most of us would like to admit. The Stanford Prison Experiment is [bunk](https://theconversation.com/the-infamous-stanford-prison-experiment-was-flawed-so-why-is-it-still-so-influential-today-246881?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), but you only have to read a few accounts of Romanian prisons or American lynchings to know that there are sadists waiting for their opportunity everywhere and a crowd ready to help them along. Just a day at an elementary school shows us that children will gladly taunt someone for the crime of having the wrong shoes. The sweetness of maltreatment, more than misguided justice or an addiction to power, is the privation of *love*. Our relationships with other human beings rely on emotional and physical connection in which we recognize, respond to, learn from, play with, encourage, challenge, give to, sacrifice for, forgive, and love each other. Cruelty takes the infinite joy of being face to face with another person and torches it, making their good our stumbling block. This is the primal logic of envy and zero-sum thinking. Some of the African doctors I work with tell me that they have to be very careful when they go back to their home communities because poisonings (presumably committed out of envy for their professional status) are not uncommon. Women the world over put charms on their children because they fear the “evil eye” of a barren woman somewhere in the village will bring sickness or death. Rather than delighting in another’s joy, our instinct is to destroy it. According to this logic, the only way that I can get ahead is to bring someone down. Surely anyone who has more than they need got it unfairly and they deserve to be brought down a peg. This is a strong motivation, but it is just as possible that my own lack—the raging maw of desire within my own heart—leads me to simply enjoy destroying someone else’s good even if I have no chance of getting anything out of the process. The world’s first murderer, Cain, certainly fits the latter picture. Nowhere in that text can we find any indication that Cain’s second-best offering would have been bumped to first place by murdering his brother. No, Scripture tells us, sin was simply waiting for its opportunity to master the first man who let his disappointment give way to rage. We only have to wait a few more chapters until the candy shop is open for business, when Jacob’s sons plunder an entire city to avenge their sister’s rape. A sense of wrongedness is all violence needs to open the floodgates. ## Conclusion Some of us would never be tempted by this particular sin, and God bless them. We can try our darnedest to keep the incorrigibly sadistic away from guns but not keyboards. The temptation is prevalent enough within the population to be a problem and there are not nearly enough people immune to the mob’s siren song to save society from our vicious impulses. There are no simple solutions here. Jesus Christ, himself the divine victim of earthly mob justice who defused a mob by inviting those without sin to cast the first stone, has been easily misappropriated throughout history in order to sweeten the moral treat. His radical ethic of love has been powerful enough to reshape empires but it can still be ignored by anyone clever enough to fool themselves. Christians love to fixate on his condemnation of the Pharisees or his cleansing of the temple to the exclusion of anything else he said or did during his 3 years of ministry. You can only remind people that they are only one lick of the lollipop away from being the mob begging for a crucifixion so many times before they start to ask if you're a collaborator who belongs on the next cross over. Our longing for justice and our thirst for blood will come to an end at Jesus’s second coming, but not a moment sooner. It's extraordinarily difficult to make people less susceptible to demagoguery. I don't know if it's possible to do so on a scale any larger than a classroom, if that. As hopeful as I am for all of us to grow in character and moral fiber, social media is not helping us move in the right direction. Rather, we must help those at the front of the crowd learn to recognize when their pulse is quickening with the taste of blood. A thousand small voices calling for calm can be overpowered by one megaphone announcing that the Moral Treats Emporium is open for business and the opportunity to be cruel to someone is available. People who know better must stop lying to themselves about how their righteous indignation is just an excuse for their vicious impulses. The language of moral opprobrium must be like the f-word or an ice cream sundae, a rare treat rather than one’s daily sustenance. Some influencers, activists, and politicians might have to find new jobs if they took this sin seriously enough in their lives. The rest of us need to starve them of attention and refuse to give in to the emotional blackmail that has come to constitute political discourse. In the social media age, a healthy part of loving others requires that you just shut up. The opportunity to hurt others lies behind far too much of our righteous indignation. The human desire to maltreat others is the twisted perversion of the love we are all meant to share with one another, which means that growing in the practice of love will make it harder and harder for us to cherish maltreatment in our hearts. The alternative is to keep gorging ourselves on treats, which is only bound to make us sicker.