It’s wise for those in power to have the same moral values as those they rule. Tribes which conquered older civilisations often adopted the faith of the conquered, such as the Franks in Gaul or Turks in the Near East. Alternatively, they incentivised the people to adopt their faith, as in Moorish Spain. Where rulers practised a different faith to the ruled, their authority would never truly be accepted.
That is a problem at the heart of our current political discontent, and what’s been both shocking and revealing about many of the stories of widespread sexual abuse by grooming gangs is the perverse morality of so many in positions of power. It’s not that they made the wrong call, but that their entire moral order seems incomprehensible. In one case a judge ruled that there should be harsher sentences for rapists who attacked Asian women than for those who raped white women. In another incident, ‘a rape gang beat two girls so badly they required the hospital’ but police instead focussed on the racist language of the victims. The abusers weren’t arrested.
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